😂 The New Workflow Units is Laughable😂

schnetzlerjoe · 2024-10-20T18:45:28.330Z

As a Bubble user since 2017, I have not built an app from scratch in years. I gave up on it long ago once they raised seed financing and the focus you can tell turned away from MVP’s or anything beyond that to internal apps at major corporations (look at their landing page) + I began getting asked left and right to migrate sites off of it.

Out of need to for a quick build, I decided to use Bubble to build a simple one page app with a total Workflow count of 52 and 4 total DB tables a week ago (my first out of the dozens and dozens Bubble apps I have built in the way past using non WF Units apps). Just to get it up. Well in one week this app has consumed 6M+ workflow units . Its literally just laughable that this app is sitting in a docker container probably clustered with a bunch of other apps on a $25-$50 server and they are charging a 1000X premium on the server costs.

Needless to say I spent the weekend moving it entirely off of Bubble into a Svelte + Deno serverless app. All I can do is laugh.

P.S: I do not blame where Bubble has become. I entirely get it. You have to make money and with VC funds (as a startup founder myself) I get you need to scale and fast. I am merely just pointing out the yin and yang of Bubble in 2017 from someone who was there to now in 2024.

cha_james · 2024-10-20T19:07:46.165Z

Idk what you were building but 6 million workflow units a week, or 24 million a month is insane for a one page app. Normally when I’ve seen this kind of workflow usage there’s been an issue with the way it’s built, making searches or similar crazily inefficient. We have fairly complex apps with 10,000s users a month which are nowhere near that.

schnetzlerjoe · 2024-10-20T19:15:58.677Z

@cha_james I am sure that may be the case. There are a lot of users from the gecko 10K+ and it was not built in any way to be efficient. Like I said, we just wanted to get it up fast. Not the end of the world. Just needed the ambition to move it off this weekend which is almost done with and will only cost ~$25/month.

Just funny/interesting to see the contrast from the last time I did something similar.

adamhholmes · 2024-10-20T19:31:03.417Z

schnetzlerjoe:

Just to get it up. Well in one week this app has consumed 6M+ workflow units

That’s a sure sign of an extremely inefficiently built app (regardless of what platform it’s built on!!).

I happen to agree that Bubble’s pricing plan is absurd (and will likely end up being the ultimate downfall of Bubble as a viable platform…)… but it can be a good way to gauge build efficiency, if nothing else…

But 6m WU in a week is crazy high!.. (especially for a new app).

chris.williamson1996 · 2024-10-20T19:36:59.078Z

This definitely comes down to optimization, I have a marketplace app with millions of database records, 200k-500k visitors per month, and only using 2-4m WU per month. The app isn’t even really optimized.

I don’t know your app but I’d almost guarantee with <5 hrs of work you could see a 10x or more reduction in WU usage.

I agree the markup is pretty crazy but there are build practices that can cut this down drastically.

schnetzlerjoe · 2024-10-20T19:48:46.495Z

Yeah most of the apps I have migrated were similar or even larger which are cheaper then this one. I already know I can optimize the Workload usage considering the time it took me to build it but I would rather spend the 12-14 hours to entirely move it off (spend 95% less) and when it comes to optimizations, focus on the actual performance, not the workload usage then spend 5 hours optimizing the WU and then have to continue focus on that + the perfomance in the future. There is already to much to juggle with modern day applications.

More of a surprise + coming to a realization then a complaint. It seems to be the total opposite of the vision + values that they came pushing with in 2012. Plus, charging someone 1000x on a commodity cost WITH vendor lock is comical. But they seem to be doing fine doing it. So power to them.

system · 2024-12-29T18:45:58.338Z

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