What are the future plans for the Bubble platform?

How amazing is the Bubble platform for the non-programmer?

If you asked me that question, a non programmer, I would say it saves me around 3 years to learn how to build the kind of complex app I need. But with Bubble I could adequately build a web version in a month or two. Bubble is really amazing and offers a crucial value I would be happy to pay for.

There aren’t many platforms like Bubble and I am not sure about the actual demand for these types of platforms, but in theory these kinds of platforms are the future. I am thinking if Bubble starts to grow and catches the attention of big developer platforms it might become a threat to their business model.

So I was wondering about the future outlook of Bubble, if it will go big, stay small niche, or sell to another company like Parse.com (its fate is the reason for asking this ?).

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Interesting question… Here is where our head is right now.

Our goal is that eventually people don’t use code any more for 95% of stuff that require coding today. So, essentially, we want Bubble to be as big as possible, and we want everyone to use it (I guess it’s obvious?). So we don’t want to stay small niche. It’s true that right now most of users belong to a rather small group of the population (tech minded, non technical people), but we think that this group will get much bigger over time, because 1) software is more and more need (why is everyone trying to learn how to code?) 2) Bubble will be easer and easier 3) more and more content will be available to learn it. That’s how we think we can go big.

In terms of selling, this is definitely not where we want to go. That’s the kind of things that can always change, but over the last 4 years, all the decisions we’ve made pretty much made selling to another company very hard: not raising money, not hiring a ton of people, etc. Bubble now starts growing pretty quickly, this is very exciting for us, and we want to keep building it!

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It’s good to hear that, I hoping that bubble could provide all of the application building resources and services that I need in the future.

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Well that’s definitely where we want to go, which will mean at some point opening the platform so that people can have their own plugins, sell / buy them, native apps, etc.

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That’s an encouraging reply! Over the last four years I’ve tried more than 20 platforms to try and develop a very complicated app that entails a lot of variances and using about 1000 different document templates that needs to be dynamically populated. To date I have not been able to do it.

Some platforms were good but entailed to learn how to code. Coding has always fascinated me but I could never master it to a level of actually developing something with it. Other platforms either closed down, sold out or sold false promises which meant I had to restart my app every time.

Bubble is the first platform that I’ve used that does not sell me false hope. Yes Bubble does have it’s challenges like any other platform but it’s the first time that I’ve actually seen the light at the end of the tunnel for what I want to accomplish. Phase 1 of 8 of my app is due for release end of June latest. Bubble has actually given me the ability to add much more to my app than I thought is possible.

I went from not being able to develop my own app to being able to even develop for clients. Well done Bubble.

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Thanks, @muradamod for opening up this conversation.

I realize I’m going into tough territory here but are there any assurances you can offer as to your ability to maintain the Bubble service. I’m at a crossroads trying to determine if I should move my apps over to Bubble. I’m currently paying for a personal plan but really may move up in the next month or so if things go well. The concern is that if Bubble doesn’t continue, I’d be uniquely constrained by having an app that is only able to run in this ecosystem with no ability to export a codebase out. Yes, all new ventures involve risk but I just need to voice the concern.

In the event things did go south, how could our applications continue to run? Could Bubble be hosted in another location? Could the infrastructure be reproduced in a manner that permitted us to continue to run the services independently even if Bubble could not run them?

I realize that these aren’t the most glorious of questions to ask, but they are very real concerns for those who are contemplating making a serious investment of moving existing applications.

Thanks for listening.

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Bubble have said that they will make the code open source should they not be able to continue.

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This can help too:

I just took this morning a crash presentation of Out System. Bubble isn’t so far from it, but the actual difference is 50000$ per year, versus 300$ per month for full package with Bubble. In professional environment, I’m still shy to say we are using ‘bubble’, I keep it for now as a secret weapon :wink:

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@NigelG said it all. It’s a firm commitment we’ve made publicly in our FAQ.

And our enterprise solution is basically about having a bubble instance on s different cluster. So it’s def possible.

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