Biweekly Community Poll
(that means alternating weeks)
How long did it take you to ship your first fully functional, user ready Bubble app?
- A few days
- A few weeks
- A few months
- Building my 1st app right now
0
voters
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ok closing the poll now.
Is anyone surprised by the results?
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Yes. Thought people would ship MVPs faster. Though I feel like people might’ve answered as ‘how long have you been working on it’ rather than how long did you work on it before shipping it.
In realistic terms, for a non-coder who is moderately familiar with logical concepts / some technical ideas, I reckon they can launch an acceptable app in a month full time (taking into account learning, rebuilding, whatever…).
Days, for a new user? No chance if it’s going to be any good. Weeks? Maybe, if you’re a fairly technical person even if you don’t code. Month or two? Sounds about right. Curious to see what others think about this
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Not really. Most new users are not coming into Bubble with nothing else to do, so more of a ‘weekend warrior’ type, which definitely means, more time in relation to weeks/months rather than hours.
I’d imagine if asking how many months, from 1-3, 4-6, 7-9, 10-12 you’d have more variation in the answers.
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Just integrating Stripe alone (using the API connector) will take weeks for a first-timer.
Months seems about right if you’re taking the time to first watch/read tutorials, design your DB correctly (or at least semi-correctly), build things in a secure and WU-performant way, then figure out the intricacies of whatever APIs you’re dealing with at the time. Then there’s setting up all your styles, design, etc. Months seems right.
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Bubble’s impossible to get started with. The UI isn’t intuitive, the help is nonexistent, most videos are too long and not geared toward learners, and the forum is unhelpful. I’m close to giving up on Bubble, this was supposed to be the easiest and it’s been anything but.
Sorry to hear that, but you haven’t posted anything!
If you’re struggling to work out where to start, and don’t like Bubble’s education materials, I recommend https://buildcamp.io/ (not affiliated). There are plenty of other free Bubble courses too, the largest being https://build.airdev.co/bootcamp.
You might hear ‘no-code’ and think you’ll be able to hop on and build an app in a week. That’s not true - there’s still things to learn, and you’ll need help along the way.
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Bubble has a big learning curve, if you don’t have prior programming experience.
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I got started on Bubble March 2018, when the internet had 3 sites listed on Google as having anything to do with Bubble, one of which was Bubble homepage, the other the forum and the 3rd was an agency. There was one youtube channel putting out some good beginner tutorials, that were normally 5 minutes long. This means, Bubble had no educational material at all.
I too almost gave up as I hit a brick wall, even after engaging ‘an expert’ at $2/minute to not solve my problem…the problem was simple filtering.
I took to the forum, got the answer and was able to continue my Bubble journey.
Do not give up, it is not like learning how to rollerblade where even if you did learn how to do it well, you’d still look like an idiot forever while doing it. Instead, learning Bubble can transform your life; literally.
Feel free to send me a private message to arrange a free one on one to help you get over some of the hurdles you are facing while trying to get started.
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I hear ya but I’d encourage you to continue to persevere - at least see your initial idea through to some semblance of a working model, even if it doesn’t look good - what you’ll learn in the process will be invaluable.
I started January 2022. I knew nothing about Bubble, and nothing about programming other than I’d heard the phrase ‘No-code’ and I understood logic (i.e. if this, than that), mostly thanks to some Excel experience. I had an idea, stumbled upon Bubble after Googling various no-code features I was looking for. In the process, I’ve re-built the idea several times, playing around with different data structures, experimented with different ways to approach features, learning about search efficiency, etc. In a few weeks time I am about to launch - but what I have learned over the past 30 months, I know if starting at square 1 with the same idea knowing what I know now, I could do in 6 months, maybe less.
So keep on keeping on! You’ll look back at where you started and marvel at how you’ve grown.
I started 1 year ago and am running into severe limitations over and over again (although I must say I’m building a more complex product on bubble it seems). Bubble helped in the sense to have a naive expectation of what I will be able to do in a small amount of time and therefore pushed me to launch a crappy MVP on which I had a significant first Customer which I’ve learned tons about what my product should look like. I’m now building the fully developed version of the product but it can be very frustrating at times of what simple things bubble cannot do. Don’t want to give it up as I’m in too deep. However, if I could start over, I would probably go for learning code directly as it is much more flexible and generally applicable. You can build a functioning monolith with less APIs / services to integrate as you can more controllably build them yourself… But take this with a grain of salt as I din’t try out the code track yet 
Severe limitations I’ve run into you might also need / want to consider:
- ongoing stability issues (although they got better in recent times)
- privacy rules not possible to be set based on child records in tables (only direct records of users in the thing let you properly restrict access). When you want granular control of CRUD operations you have to reflect every user in every thing where he/she should be able to perform CRUD actions which creates insane amount of redundancies in database records and a very big potential for mistakes in the many duplicate workflows you have to set up (it’s crazy how many hours I’ve spent creating workflows / debugging just because it’s not possible to normalize the privacy functions / logic)
- natively switching from private to public file and back is not possible + performing operations in the backend or with plugins on private files (file attached to a thing that has privacy restrictions) is not possible.
- key operations / logic are missing
deleting / adapting only parts of a condition is not possible
correct logical grouping of AND and OR statements
using IF THEN ELSE Logic
For / While Loops
reusable conditions (single source of truth conditions) - using values in memory is not possible in workflows - you always have to write operable data to disk before you can perform operations on it
- controlling if workflowsteps are executed synchronously / asynchronously
- strong lock-in effects / no easy exportability of logic & database design
All in all I would say Bubble is good for trying out simple MVPs but building a production ready tool is not really meant to be on this platform in its current state – And I don’t expect Bubble to ever move to a state where it is…
That’s only my opinion but many forum posts I’ve stumbled upon give the impression that many other users have similar frustrations with Bubble. Hope this honest opinion helps to inform your decision if you want to continue with Bubble or not.
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i highly recommend xano for many of these things.
bubbles backend is not geared towards more complex apps. i have made it work but with xano it is 300% easier.
pm me if you need help, i am german.
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I agree. Any non-trivia app would be easier with Xano because of Bubble’s limitation, although it would take a bit longer.
This is a massive problem right now, given how multimodal AI APIs require you to upload files (audio, video, etc.). Huge oversight. Hope @allenyang and the team are thinking about this issue.
I would say start with creating your own plugins. If you can’t do this at a high level then there’s no way you would have been able to build your app with code. The way I see it, Bubble is like a set of training wheels that lets you move fast enough to get you to where you need to go.
This isn’t true @randomanon - you can append an API token to the file URL and it’ll work with private files.
Sure its a possible route trying to patch a system with legacy / a lot of processes you cannot fully see a/o understand. However, then you’re still locked in to Bubbles platform when with developing your own code, you get more control & ownership of the tech your developing which I think is a big win & more sustainable.
My plan now is to launch v1, get some customers on board and earn some money, and replacing bubble with my own code stack in the middleterm.
Can you give an example of how you used this? Would be great to being able to perform actions on private files (e.g. compiling a zip with privacy gated files in the backend with a connected plugin).
?api_token={app API key} will grant access to any private files so that you plug-in/custom code or whatever can access it for whatever you need. Operations on files aren’t really supported but once you can actually access the private file, you can do what you want with it.
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gee that’s great. Going to test it out as soon as I’ll work on the issue again. Thank you so much for the tip.
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