I’d love your advice on how to navigate the Bubble Developer job market.
I have been working on Bubble as my full-time work not as a contractor but as an employee. I was fortunate enough to impress my CEO so much with what we could do for his businesses by building dashboards, workflows etc with Bubble, that I became a full-time developer for him for almost 3 years.
I got the CEO to believe in efficiency building with software so much so that he convinced himself that he needed to align with a development agency which put me out of work.
I’m not here to cry about that, I’m here to ask what the Job Marketplace is like for Bubble Developers as I stumbled into this profession and have never needed to search for work in it.
It seems that Full-time work for a company is less popular than being a freelancer, becoming a freelance brings some new challenges on my part but I am wondering if that is the only way to work as a Bubble Developer realistically or are there a lot more employee work that I am missing…
My worries about Freelance are the typical stuff of learning pricing and the time it takes for X job etc, but my biggest concern is that I feel that I can’t compete with how cheap people are on platforms like Upwork.
I also complete a lot of my work off Upwork. Would be happy to connect and have a chat as I am always interested in meeting other Local Bubble devs. I also came from a Construction background and have some similar experience.
You can’t compare your pricing to the hourly rates on UpWork. Most the low rates folks on UpWork don’t have good knowledge. They’ve been through a bootcamp and done a couple of projects.
If you have REAL Bubble experience state this confidently, such as and Stripe API connections, APIs in general, masterly of responsive tools within Bubble and web standards, Database design beyond the typical DataTypes, a database that will scale and not bottleneck workflows searches, strong troubleshooting skill sets, great experience in permissions security, etc.
Share OTHER development skills you have in web development. I have a background in web dev 10+ years in UI/UX, I understand the steps in building web apps and what makes GOOD user friendly design.
Keep in mind your pace of work, if you are slower then some other developers, you shouldn’t charge higher hourly rates. If a task takes you 10 hrs yet another developer can complete it in say 6 hrs, your hourly rate needs to match the end payout or people won’t keep you on their list to call when needed.
Pricing can really get bloated too. Yes, this is visual programming, but some Bubble developers are charging rates as much as a Full Stack developers. Be real, charge for YOUR VALUE, what you bring to the table, not what the market range associates, because the market rates for Bubble Developers are NOT accurate to the skills and talent they should be supporting.
