When it comes to understanding money, it must be understood from a perspective of the time value of money, and not just the single figure displayed. For example, is $300 a month really just $300 a month, or is it worth much more?
After graduating with a Finance degree, I was well aware of how money works and considered myself financially literate, while nearly 70% of US adults are financially illiterate.
I see a lot of Bubble developers expressing opinions around business expenses and business revenues, that indicate they may be financially illiterate.
So letâs say for example that you are planning on building a bubble app to launch a business. You correctly see Bubble as a platform, that is not just for MVP, but can be used for apps that can scale or internal tools etc. and in that early part of planning, you know there to be established methods to reduce your costs of operating the app on Bubble. Letâs say hypothetically that is the difference of around 95% so when you look at the workload unit tiers and see $299/month for 2.5 million workload units, could be reduced to $0/month as 5% of 2.5 million is only 125,000 WUs a month and so well within the range of 175,000 units a month you get from your starter plan, you recognize correctly that as a savings of $300/month, what would you rather do with that $300/month?
Invest for 10 Years at 5% interest and accumulate around $47,000
Invest for 30 Years at 5% interest and accumulate around $250,000
Upgrade my Car from Honda Accord to Mercedes E class (roughly $300/month higher lease fee)
Save $3,600/year for a yearly 1 week all inclusive Carribbean Holiday
Reduce my monthly debt obligations to afford an additional $50,000 on a home mortgage.
Give it to Bubble - after all it is a drop in the bucket for my business.
I guess that a good business would potentially yield more revenue that any investment in financial assets. At least thatâs what every entrepreneur should think before starting the journey.
Thereâs the risk thing too. I guess thatâs why you should always put your eggs in different baskets.
I donât consider myself a financials literate, to be honest. I just prefer to invest in my own projects when I really believe in them.
This is exactly the thing, if youâre building something and itâs a winner-take-all market where winning means $50M and losing means $50K, then youâre not winning by âsavingâ $47K over 10 years. If I can choose between spending 30 minutes on marketing vs 30 minutes on optimizing WU, I know which one Iâm choosing.
What would you use that $300 a month to invest in then? More marketing spend? More features?
You have a misguided interpretation of what it means to optimize for WUs. No it doesnât cost more development time to do so, so no it doesnât cost you any extra money to develop features that optimize for performance which in turn equates to lower WU costs.
When you do not optimize for performance and you spend 30 minutes on marketing and money on marketing and x% of users after clicking onto the advert link leave before page is loaded (because of lack of knowledge around how to optimize for performance) you are throwing money away and hurting yourself financially.
But instead of just chiming in with nonsense, why not answer the poll? What would you do with the extra $300/month if you were capable of building an app optimally that costs $300/month less to operate?
For historical context, workload unit pricing was introduced as a way to remove âcapacityâ pricing, which capacity was based on how much work your app does in a certain period, and when hitting capacity it was slowed down or taken offline. Now, with workload units we can just simply know our app will continue to function without slowdowns and will not be taking offline unless we choose to do so in order to avoid workload unit overages or adding additional workload units.
I typically implore people to take things âfrom the horse mouthâ which in this case would mean, donât listen to me telling you as you donât trust my wisdom and experience, so instead just take it from the words of one of the co-founders who stated as much in the AMA for AI.
You can very easily test this and verify it for yourself, or just look at what more experienced developers are demonstrating on the forum through their tests and understand that a direct correlation between a FETCH and the amount of data returned is going to result in lower workload unit costs and increases content download speed (ie: performance) and in other areas, like backend workflows, which has workload units tied directly to the time to process data, so if you are able to reduce the processing time of the data, you are lowering your workload unit costs and improving the speed at which the data is processed (ie: performance).
Do you have some other insight that you would like to share that makes you feel confidently that the statement of âperformance and wu are opposite thingsâ? Iâm always willing to learn, and in fact, I return to the forum everyday for 7 years to learn new things, so I love it when people are able to tell me Iâm wrong, so that I can thank them for teaching me something I didnât know before.
I mean honestly, how hard is to understand? You seemed to have like the post linked below about WU and performanceâŚso what is your deal Rando?
Simplest example of what I mean is, letâs say a user might download something or they might not. Do you optimize for WU or do you download it anyway before they might need to use it?
The decision totally depends on what situation your business it at. If youâve already found PMF (product market fit) itâs easy, and youâre likely investing more on marketing.
If you havenât reached that point then you would probably be investing on everything else: product development, market research, financial planningâŚ
Eh, I wouldnât be so sure. The most performant (the fastest) way to do something is often the most WU efficient, but not always. We make decisions, as businesses, about tradeoffs. Often, it makes sense to spend more WU when it leads to a better user experience as it appears more performant to the end user.
That can be useful for prerendering pages. However, my app is a single-page app, so the script is not helpful since it loads just as quick.
Iâm not sure why everyone doesnât just have a single page app on Bubble. But, I assume they have their own reasons.
Iâm guessing maybe what the premise of your post is about has to do with your plugin that you developed?
And youâre trying to have people understand they can save money by using your plugin?
It sounds like a good pluginâŚbut I think where the problem is, is in the marketing of it.
I think youâre brilliant when it comes to BubbleâŚbut sometimes you can overcomplicate your answers to the point they become confusing. This is what it seems like youâve done with the marketing of your plugin. Just my thoughts?
Not sure what Iâd do with an extra $300. Thatâs about a meal out somewhere. Donât see that option on your survey though
Optimising for WU often comes at the direct cost of performance (and vice-versa)⌠There are many case where this is trueâŚ
In most cases, (certainly in my experience) both clients and end users care much more about app perforce than about shaving off a few WU. Itâs performance that will keep Users using the app (or, rather, stop them leaving), and therefore money coming in, which makes WU costs less of an issue to even consider. Bad performance/UX will get more complaints from a client than high WU costs.
Obviously, if thereâs massive WU inefficiency then thatâs different, but for the most part optimising for performance should take priority over WU.
And besides, WU costs are completely arbitrary - somebody at Bubble decided what certain things should cost; some of it based, at least vaguely, on actual server resource usage, and some definitely not.
Whoâs to say that, in 6 monthâs time, Bubble wonât completely revise their WU costing, or change it completely - and an appâs WU optimisation no longer applies (thatâs exactly what happened with the switch from Capacity to WU in many cases).
My take is this.. just build efficiently, within best practices, to produce apps as performant as they can ever be on Bubble, and the WU costs are what they are.
If theyâre too high to make an app viable, then either the business model is invalid, the development practices are way off the mark, or Bubble simply isnât the right tool for the specific app.
Yeah itâs super funny how they calculated it using a very basic and very flawed statistical model (even when an actual statistician came in here to explain all the problems with their method). Basically itâs a linear correlation with server usage rather than server usage itself. Wouldnât be surprised if they moved from one arbitrary model to another in the future.
