Sticking with Bubble or considering alternatives?

Need help
1

I’m building a marketplace on Bubble, and it has around 2000 users now. While I appreciate Bubble’s ease of use, I’m finding that managing WU costs as I scale is a growing concern, and I’m beginning to wonder if there might be better long-term solutions.

My primary challenges lie in:

  • Search: With searches averaging 130 WU per user per month, this single feature consumes a significant portion of my WU budget. (at least 260k WU per mo)
  • API integrations: I’m want to build a chatbot using OpenAI’s API, but the WU cost per call is giving me pause. Considering each conversation would need to retain message history.
  • Backend workflows: I’ve seen countless horror stories of complex workflows leading to astronomical WU bills. Simple things like order notifications have me worried about unexpected WU spikes.

I’ve already optimized my app’s database and workflows, which provided some relief. However, I anticipate these challenges will only intensify as my marketplace expands.

So, here’s my question to the community:

For those who have successfully scaled marketplaces on Bubble, what strategies have you employed to manage WU costs effectively?

Alternatively, has anyone successfully migrated to a different platform? I’m considering a switch as I find Bubble’s pricing model unsustainable for my business. However, the migration process seems daunting given my current setup:

  • 1000+ products that need to be imported
  • 20+ workflows that need to be rebuilt
  • Multiple integrations and data settings to reconfigure

I’d love to hear about your migration experience:

Which platform did you move to?
What were your actual switching costs (both time and money)?

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2

First important point: you can continue using Bubble, it will handle your demand without any problems, however, you will probably have to migrate to a more robust plan or buy tiers to cover all the WU you will consume.

If you are not willing to increase your costs with Bubble, follow the strategy I used to save 97% of my WU.

Context

To give you some context, I have a system for sending mass messages on WhatsApp + a chat space that is also integrated into WhatsApp.

  • Chat
  1. Recording of each message that arrives on WhatsApp in the Bubble database
  2. API to send each new message via chat
  • For each message sent, I have the following actions
  1. API call
  2. “Sending” record
  3. Update of the sending status in the table

Now imagine, more than 200 clients, where each client sends more than 1000 messages per day. My WU cost would be very high.

Solution

I started using Bubble only as a front-end.
I installed N8N and Supabase on a VPS and now I have:

  • All my logic flows occur within N8N and no longer in Bubble.
  • All my records are made in Supabase and no longer in Bubble.
  • I have Supabase synchronized in real-time (RT) with Bubble to respond to RT in the chat.

Suggested reading

I wrote a article that is going to teaches how to do the RT between Supabase and Bubble
(How to configure real-time between Supabase and Bubble.io)

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