I think I have a pretty “heavy” bubble app, with 600+ backend workflows, 100+ reusable elements, and very active users - my product is a business communication platform (with Twilio in the background), so our users are in there all day. Looking at September, we were averaging ~50k WU per user (and there’s pretty wide variance in which users are actually active, so the median user is probably closer to ~60-70k).
We charge enough for the product that this isn’t a huge margin issue, but it made me curious about where we stand in the world of complex bubble apps. I couldn’t really find anything in the forum about real-world usage.
Where does your monthly average WU per user land? I’d love to collect some data points in this post to get a sense of what folks are seeing. Obviously, the nature of your product will drive big variance here as well, so it’ll be lots of apples and oranges, but I am just curious
if you charge your users more than they cost you, and your app is performant, it doesn’t matter how much wu they use imo. but there must be some optimization room for your case, what is the most costly action in your metrics?
That’s pretty hard to estimate. If I just divide our average monthly WU usage by the number of active users, I get something around 1,800 WU per user. But some users log in every day, while others might only log in once a month. We currently have around 350 active subscriptions.
Bubble already has access to this kind of data, so it would be really interesting if they shared some benchmarks with us. It would definitely make this kind of analysis much more useful.
I’ll let the professionals on Bubble who know more than I do about work units answer that.
I would suggest, though, that you look into telnyx.com if you’re doing a lot of messaging, and somewhere else besides SendGrid (which I’m sure you know Twilio owns) for your emails.
SendGrid isn’t that great. You share IPs and need to worry about your emails going to the spam folders.
Telnyx owns its telecom networks, and Twilio rents all the networks and then charges you on top of that to make a profit.
With Telnyx and Postmark, you would probably cut your bill by about 50% a month over what you pay Twilio for text and email service.
For the data collection, it may help to ask each respondent for the same denominator: unique users active during that calendar month, rather than all paid subscriptions. A user who opens the app once and one who works in it all day otherwise count equally.
Alongside WU/monthly active user, I’d record active user-days and one product-specific volume measure — in your case, messages processed. Reporting WU per active user-day and per 1,000 messages would make the comparisons more interpretable. Also note whether scheduled housekeeping and inbound webhooks are included in the total.
We don’t have a comparable measured benchmark to contribute, so I wouldn’t label 50–70k high or low from the user count alone.
