Hi everyone,
I am working on an app that would like to do bi-weekly payments. I would like to use recurring workflows, but unfortunately that’s unavailable because we can only choose between daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly.
I know what you might be thinking…
Why not use a backend workflow that re-schedules itself in two weeks?
THE PROBLEM: Complicated, Inflexible and Expensive
- Expensive. I am currently using weekly payments to get around this. This is now going to be very expensive with the new pricing plan, because although I want to optimize my app (as per Bubble’s recommendation) I am running this workflow four times a month instead of twice a month due to this limiting factor.
- Timezones. I want the bi-weekly payment to happen at exactly midnight of the user’s timezone. The timezone on the client-side is not the same as the timezone in the backend. This means that when I reschedule the event in current-date-time + 2 weeks, it will be scheduled at a different time than the first time. I could figure out the user’s timezone, pass it on to the backend workflow, make sure that it’s taken into consideration when scheduling the event… but come on… who wants to deal with that? Timezones are a nightmare
- Inflexible. Why should I only be able to choose in between a handful of predefined periods? Why shouldn’t Bubble user’s be able to make that choice?
And ever since the ability to override timezones was removed the issue has become a lot more complicated (I had created a solution with this feature, and then it was removed…). I know it’s possible to workaround this with the current tools we have, but it’s too complicated for the average Bubbler.
THE SOLUTION: Make recurring workflows dynamic
Scheduling workflows should be dynamic just like everything else in bubble. I should be able to say “I want this workflow to run every n days”. N could be 6, 98, 14. Anything a user wants.
DISCUSSION
The new pricing updates are here and as a consequence developers need to be more careful about optimizing things. As a result, we should expect Bubble to get serious about giving us the tools to optimize our own apps in return. I am sure others have been in the same shoes as me, and opted for a frequency of workflows because that’s all that was available and stayed silent because it didn’t change very much.