First off, let me say that I LOVE BUBBLE. The app and the support team is great.
UNFORTUNATELY, I’m having a hard time with pricing structure and possibly won’t be using you to build my app. You charge by “WORKFLOW RUNS”. Some of them are not charged but basically anytime you interact with the database it counts it as a workflow run. I run a website in which I post updates to a community of people about 4000 deep. I make between 200-1000 of these updates in the morning and in the evening. So between 400-2000 updates every day X 30 days a month would be between 12000 and 60,000 workflow runs. And that’s just the updates! I also have other tools on the site, which the users would also be making calls to the database so I estimated that the workflow runs would be in the hundreds of thousands every month. I pay only $8 a month to host this application right now (built with PHP, MySQL, jQuery). So there’s no way they can compete price wise with what I have already. I was also trying to achieve a REAL TIME update, something like Socket.IO or php websockets would provide me, but it seems that Bubble is not exactly real-time when it comes to refreshing the data. when I make an update, I need that data to refresh in real time to all my connected users. When I would make an update with Bubble, sometimes the client would update almost instantly, other times never at all and that just can’t happen. Cool concept though
I don’t agree with this at all. I think when you compare Bubble with other programs it provides a wealth of benefits that are not found elsewhere. It allows us to program pretty much whatever we think of quickly and efficiently. But the market is the market and people perceive value differently. For me though my subscription is one of the most worthwhile investments I make every month. The value proposition is very attractive to me. Plus keep in mind these guys are working full time to expand and improve the program. We pay a small price in my opinion for this continued loyalty and support. Last thing I want is @emmanuel or @josh leaving for greener pastures.
Just like anything, this particular technology solution may not be right for your needs, and that’s ok. I don’t have the ability or patience to spin up my own application using code, so Bubble is my solution. If you’ve got the means to run your stack, that’s great! Bubble is perfect for me to build my business on, but my monetization allows me to cover the costs. If yours doesn’t, i can understand why Bubble isn’t your solution. Best of luck with your app!
I partly agree with you @marcusjamesreed I have no problem with the system but starting at around 20€ that’s very high for a personal plan! @emmanuel and the other guys should really consider lowering the price a little bit or adding a new cheaper plan. I know that bubble is unique but if you look at competitors you can get a lot more for half the price .
I have a hard time understanding that $20 a month is expensive considering what you get.
I think it’s really cheap, actually. I’ve based my entire company on Bubble, and I’m more than happy to pay $79 for the professional plan considering the value it gives me.
I’ve built an app with Bubble that would cost me ALOT to hire developers for. The project would never even been realized, because of the initial cost of hiring developers.
I am curious as to where you can get a lot more “of what Bubble is offering” for half the price? I have never been able to find a solution that even comes close to Bubble.
@Bradluffy I might have expressed myself in a bad way, since bubble unique its a little bit hard to compare but the closest thing I can compare to are , drag and drop site builders or website hosters. Ofcourse bubble has its unique platform and features but if I compare it to for example One or Wix they are cheaper and have more suitable plans for “normal” users.
@pnodseth 20€ may be cheap for you as a business owner ,but if you ask for example a student like me it may feel more expensive. Everything is relative
Sure
But I think that it would be unfair to compare to the prices of pure website builders like WIX.
WIX can make you a website and nothing more.
You should at least compare it to other app builder platforms, and if you do I suspect you would see that Bubble’s pricing is quite reasonable.
Might be time to starting thinking about how to monetize if you have 4,000 users. Even without Bubble, as an app scales it will cost more, otherwise your performance will suffer.
With Bubble, you can’t compare to a basic php shared server. In addition to server costs, you are paying Bubble for the quick build without code features Bubble’s services are priced very reasonably for someone that needs them.
What do you class as an update…i can’t believe anyone would sit and make 1000 individual updates in a morning and then again in the evening. A workflow run that changes data counts towards your plan, BUT a worflow that change multiple things in the db simultaneously still only counts as 1 workflow.
maybe you are looking at your application wrong (or maybe your design needs a review/refresh). Also, Real-time very rarely needs to be real time - it is just a perception to an end-point. Yes if you are doing high value trading in volatile markets then real-time is critical, why else would these sorts of system owners invest hundreds of millions of dollar running dedicated fibre optic connections to shave off a few milliseconds of latency!
I think some of you guys are completely missing the point of what I am saying. Sure if I could just stick to the personal plan this would be an awesome platform, but because of the number of work flow runs which which I estimate to be around 500,000 per month, it will be several hundred dollars a month versus $8 with what I am paying now.
And yes I in fact have to make up to 1000 individual “updates” in the morning and in the afternoon. My website is attempting to serve as a live update service for workers that are dispatched from a work location. The update helps them determine how close they are to receiving a job. Workers are dispatched from a physical location where they pick up job tickets from a dispatcher and when dispatch occurs these jobs are handed out one after the other. This process happens very quickly and jobs are handed out second-by-second. It’s very annoying for my users to have to refresh their page to see the update. The site gets approximately a million page views every month, and although I have monetized it with Google AdSense, that income is not significant enough to be able to afford to pay $500 a month for a hosted solution such as Bubble, especially if it cannot achieve the solution.
Can’t you convert some of those users to a premium payed account? With some extra functionality?
But if bubble doesn’t support what you need in terms of functionality, the price point doesn’t even is an issue.
I still think there is implementation review required.
Without knowing what you are actually doing, it is difficult to understand your current implementation. What I mean is, are those 1000 updates simply to tell users ‘how close’ they were to getting a job and how many jobs are actually handed out.
Sounds like some sort of queue (FIFO) for the jobs, and the individual’s position on the queue is the update.
The realtime works, and it sounds like it is not exactly time critical, so no issues with an update taking a few seconds to be processed.
If you already have a working website, then maybe you don’t need bubble, but you have to look at the TCO and not just a monthly subs cost per workflow. Man hours for maintenance support, speed of updates, storage costs, hosting costs, cost of support when it goes wrong, backups, scalability/ease, etc. etc.
As someone said earlier, it maybe just doesn’t fit your use case, in which case it is perfectly acceptable to move on and find something else…no one is twisting your arm to stay. The key thing is you have properly evaluated your business model vs the product and are not just jumping to a misguided assumption.
@marcusjamesreed. I totally understand. When I first discovered Bubble I thought the same thing and I was a huge pain in the ass for @emmanuel. If you think of this in terms of a traditional stack where every query is a workflow, it seems expensive. That’s not how this is priced. Essentially, workflows are based on functions. A call to an api is different than a query. If you look at the AWS pricing, it, bubble is an incredible value.
For me it came down to a matter of maintenance, security, and service. I no longer have to keep each plate of the stack spinning and worry about open source vulnerabilities, hosting farms getting slammed by DDOS, or datacenters catching fire (sucks). Being able to speak with the platform developers is like having linus torvalds’ cell.
There’s nothing that says you can’t keep both services and shuffle data accordingly. If your current setup has an api (such as WP), Batch in one, then update in the other. You can still use your current MySql server within Bubble.
As far as monetization is concerned, I’d be more than happy to help you turn 4000 people into a personal ATM. Just shoot me your list and I’ll pay for your bubble account.
Okay, I might’ve made a mistake when doing my math. If I make 1000 updates ( this IS on the high side ) per shift, twice a day, I would be looking at a maximum of 60,000 workflow runs. I also have implemented a Timebook which users can input their hours for the shifts that they have worked. IF, every user inputs a shift, there would be another 60,000 records added to the database for those shifts. Other than that, not really anything else gets added to the database. So at a maximum, 120,000 workflow runs? That might be in the realm of possibility and if I can get that number down then that would be great. REALISTICALLY, the average number of jobs dispatched is probably around 350 jobs per shift. So at that number, I’m looking at 700 per day or about 21,000 per month. I just want to error on the side of caution. And you are exactly right @DaveA, I perhaps need to evaluate a better way of accomplishing this update. I really don’t need to store these updates in a database but how else could I persist that data?
Let me better explain what I am trying to accomplish. Workers are dispatched using an alphanumeric sequence from a physical dispatch location. Workers are assigned a workerID that consists of a letter followed by a four digit number. For instance ( A4201, A4205, A4504, A4567, A4678…etc.) When you line up to get a job, you have to line up in order of your workerID. The sequence continues all the way from A-Z but it doesn’t necessarily always go like 1,2,3,4 if you know what I mean. You are not required to work so some people simply aren’t there, some have been fired, and some sequence numbers are no longer in the system. I don’t have an incomplete list of workers right now. What I am currently doing is, using the incomplete list of workers to populate a form input that enables me to quickly update the dispatch by incrementing the current position in the list. Unfortunately I’m not the best programmer so every “update” that I make, posts to the database. Everytime someone gets a job, I make an update and like I said this happens very fast. 1000 jobs can be dispatched in about 30 minutes possibly. The second I make an update, the client should see it. That way, they can follow along with dispatch on their phones. I know this process may sound crazy, but that’s the way that it works. I created this for my fellow co-workers and at the time it was just a project to help them out. It has grown much bigger than I would have ever expected it to but I run it as a FREE service because they are my co-workers, my brothers and sisters basically and I would hate to charge people just for free information. The ads do okay…but I’m not getting rich off of it that’s for sure.
Also, let me be clear. I’m not bashing Bubble. Bubble IS AMAZING. I LOVE IT. It’s just this one application that presents some very REAL challenges for me.
Your definition of an update in your scenario does not necessarily have to translate 1:1 to Bubble workflows. It all comes done to how you design the data. From what you’ve given so far, 1000 updates can potentially use a single workflow if planned and optimized correctly.
Well, workflow runs are now not my biggest issue. The issue now is how to get these “updates” to show in real time. Like I said before, I noticed that when I add a record to the database, sometimes it is pushed to the client almost immediately but after I make about 4 or 5 of them, it lags or just doesn’t update the client at all.
platform and features but if I compare it to for example One or Wix they are cheaper and have more suitable plans for “normal” users.
,but if you ask for example a student like me it may feel more expensive. Everything is relative 
