It might be tough to stomach if you’re small, but for us with heavy load Bubble apps the pricing for Xano makes tons of sense.
We’re already paying Bubble almost $1,000 per month right now on a production plan with extra capacity to ensure smooth functionality for our users.
For the new setup, I’m looking at probably the $356 plan with Xano + $59/mo with Draftbit + $100ish for a something to host the Draftbit web app on (don’t need hosting for the mobile apps, but you do if you want a webapp with your own domain). I might also do the $500/mo for premium support and coaching with Draftbit. Even with the premium support and coaching I’ll still be paying less than I am with Bubble right now, but with so much more control over the actual application.
If you compare to the new Bubble pricing, I’d be paying 1/10th the amount for a much better result.
Xano is technically a locked-in platform as well, but as long as I build as much functionality into lambda functions as possible, as opposed to their visual worfklow builder, if I do have to switch later it won’t be that disruptive since I can just copy paste everything out and migrate the data.
Not exactly, we have an app that push to fb catalog, Google shopping, has internal analytics and runs 2-4M workflows per month. It’s already big, established, and even for big apps it makes it impossible. We will have to kill internal analytics and the daily push to catalogs likley. It’s currently on dedicated so we don’t know how high the price will be since they don’t provide the WU stats to dedicated currently but based on WFs ran & what we see the avg WF cost we will easily be in the $10k+/mo range.
This pricing very rarely makes sense to anyone from the looks of peoples screenshots.
To clarify, I’m talking about Xano pricing, not the new Bubble pricing. I was responding to the comments about the lower Xano plans not being sufficient.
I made a similar calculation for a stup with FlutterFlow + Firebase. Even if I triple my current number of users, I’d be paying about half of what I currently pay on a professional plan at bubble (around 400$ on FF vs 700$ today), not to mention the future pricing that looks like it’ll be in the thousands per month.
Still looking. I’m testing FF now. It looks very promising. Waiting for feedback from another (future ex) Bubbler who knows our app and is testing Wappler this weekend.
when you run the app in your own server you have access to the code. It is an export with full support to make it work. I guess that’s why is on the enterprise plan.
From what I’ve seen, if native mobile apps are important to you (which they are for me), but you still want to have a web app as well. There are only two good options: DraftBit and FlutterFlow.
DraftBit generates react native source code, FlutterFlow generates flutter source code. So which one you use mostly comes down to which code base you want to work with or hire help for if you have to supplement with actual coding. Both langauges are great, but very different, with different pros and cons. So do your research there.
If all you want is a web app without native mobile apps, there are more options, but I haven’t investigated those as they aren’t relative to my use case.
Regardless, for almost everything other than Bubble, you’re going to need a separate backend service to go with your frontend (how it should be tbh). Xano is the No code front runner here, but there’s no reason you can’t use AWS, Firebase, or Google Cloud if you’re willing to trade some elbow grease for better pricing and control.
Thank you for sharing. We’ve always wanted to build a native app in addition to our web app. This is the perfect opportunity to do just that . And I must say that FF so far is a lot easier to setup and has some great features, but need a little more time to get through all the features.
I had a bad experience with wappler around 2 years ago.
May have improved now
Quick notes
the generated code is machine generated. So not really that useful without the wappler editor
owning your own hosting in digital ocean/docker etc sounds fun. But it is an added cost. Bubble had a ddos attack recently. I just went to sleep and let them deal with it
definitely needed to be a full stack Dev to use wappler.
Lowcode platforms sound nice. But from experience, they need full stack web dev knowledge to operate in
Security itself can be a sensitive topic
I don’t know about flutterflow. I suspect it’ll have similar challenges.
True NoCode platforms like bubble are rare. Where you get 1 click deploy. Production and staging environments etc etc.
They have to be all in ones. And here in lies the dilemma. The benefits result in vendor lock ins…
I have yet to see a true NoCode alternative being suggested to bubble. Gives front-end, backend, hosting, on a budget.
Lowcode is a separate category and an unfair comparison.
I did just want to add to this that Noodl admins have considered promising the open-source the editor if they went under. Nothing concrete, but certainly promising - if you can still edit your code then that’s a huge + in my books
Initially I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to use FlutterFlow because I would have to write some functions in code for my app’s functionality.
However, after watching a tutorial on how custom fuctions work in FlutterFlow, plus testing some ChatGPT questions — FlutterFlow sets up your function and ChatGPT basically gives you the code to copy/paste.
Yes, there will be a bit of learning curve for the code part, but I think it will actually be a viable solution for Bubble users needing an alternative.
I have couple of questions for people exploring external service for backend, like Xano. (Is that just DB or complete backend workflows?)
When you do that, do the websockets etc still work? i.e. Will pages get automatically updated as data gets updated as they do now, or will we have to write some specific logic/code etc. to create our own websockets and have data updated? As of now Bubble maintains all that.
How will the user contexts etc. work? Will we be able to seamlessly use “current user’s field” or “is current user logged in” etc?
That’s just not true, you could 100% take wappler code and open it in any editor, change something, and then import it back into the wappler editor. In fact, you could even do something like building your application, deploy it and then stop your monthly Wappler subscription. If something small comes up you could open up the code in any ol’ editor, change what you need an deploy it. When you’re ready to add a new feature, re-start your Wappler subscription, develop it and deploy it.
Or if Wappler for some reason would stop developing the editor and for whatever reason it just vanishes, your application would just continue working like nothing has happened. And any developer could be hired to work on the code if needed.
Also not true. You should have a basic understanding of how a website works, as in how it is hosted and communicates with a server. Wappler now comes with Docker as well making it so you have to know even less about how different parts come together. But there’s absolutely no need for any wappler user to be a full stack developer. Seriously, if you were a full stack dev, why would you even need either Bubble or Wappler?
This is true, wappler is not Bubble. Most no-code all-in-one solutions are either targeted towards rapid proof of concept, MVP, or internal tooling.
A solution like Wappler is for building a production level, long term app. Which tends to mean far more work.
. And I must say that FF so far is a lot easier to setup and has some great features, but need a little more time to get through all the features.