Why does Bubble demand feel different (lower) today?

Meta
21

Haha, I agree with that statement, and I am one of them. I used to ask questions on the forum before AI was so developed. But then, I noticed a change and started asking questions to AI too—sometimes to the Bubble one, Claude, or Gemini… And when neither AI can find the answer nor my tests give me the feedback I want, I ask on the forum.

But I believe that today, a lot of subjects and problems have been covered by the forum. The product is stable, and people who want to build today have access to a huge forum Q&A and AI. Maybe this is also part of the reason there is less demand for agencies or Bubble builders.

And lastly, we are talking about people moving to self-developed apps through AI, but I think that the plugin editor—and I wish and hope the mobile plugin editor will open soon in public beta—with AI, gives people the opportunity to build the extensions that they need for their use cases. And not rely on paid or general plugins that do not fit their apps. So, less help is needed here also.

So I think that users are still here but act differently. Where maybe some of them were looking to hire a Bubble dev or agency, today with Bubble’s AI, LLMs, and BP (thanks @georgecollier, you built a product that makes things so much easier), founders/users just have more room to do things by themselves before requiring external help.

And I could not agree more with you. Building an app is the easiest part of the business. But making it successful… that’s where the challenge comes in. And yes, maybe agencies today should explore a dual business model: building + marketing an app, or at least providing some kind of guidance/support to their customers fo make an app successful on today’s market.

22

Really great, well thought out post @Newed :raising_hands:t2::ok_hand:t2:thank you.

It surprised me when I found out that Bubble was called Bubble because it sounded like Google, and not because it represented the fact that everything a person could need to build an app was contained within a self-contained system and infrastructure (i.e. a “bubble”!).

For me, this is still Bubble’s greatest strength. As apps become more complicated and businesses grow, it becomes essential that the complexity is managed. Think of the classic ‘theme park’ game where you constantly have an overview of the whole park, can see how everything relates, and can reach into any area for adjustments where needed. This is Bubble’s greatest strength… and vibe coding’s greatest weakness imo (a vibe code project can soon become a sprawling, chaotic nightmare to maintain).

Vibe coding has already won when it comes to beginners and prototypes. Anyone with a ChatGPT or Gemini subscription can build something impressive instantly. There’s so little friction that Bubble (nor anything else) can’t beat this, but it can get on par with it and integrate it if it gets its AI building side right.

Where Bubble can and does win (and should be aiming its marketing) is that next stage of an app’s development - the stage beyond the prototype when an app starts to take on real-world responsibilities and commitment, i.e. becomes a business. This is where the tools to manage the infrastructure and view stats become essential and the ability to keep an app well-organised no matter its size. This is where Bubble shines and still has an extremely valuable place.

This is a very crazy time where AI is disrupting so many types of business, but I do believe Bubble can survive - it just needs to drill down on its strengths and pivot its marketing around them. Words such as “trustworthy” “manage complexity” and “solid foundation” etc should become brand cornerstones.

{Edit: side thought… If bubble are clever they should start developing “migrate your vibe code to bubble” strategies! :grin:}

23

Personally, this shift towards AI vibe-coding was a bit discouraging for me at first. It felt like people were quickly abandoning Bubble’s well-defined infrastructure and years of ecosystem development for the latest AI trend.

I was curious why so many people preferred these new platforms, so I went ahead and tried most of them myself — v0, Replit, Lovable, and others. One thing I noticed immediately was that the AI-generated designs were nowhere close to what I was building in Bubble. Beyond that, the lack of visibility into where components lived, how things were structured, and what was happening under the hood was genuinely concerning.

During all this chaos — when Bubble jobs seemed to slow down and everyone was jumping on the AI hype train — I decided to learn the basics of coding. Not because I wanted to leave Bubble, but because I wanted to better understand the platforms I build on and not be completely dependent on any single tool.

I started with Flutter, which was very beginner-friendly, then Python, and later moved into DevOps fundamentals. Learning things like what a domain actually is, how data moves between servers and clients, how data centers, CDNs, CI/CD pipelines, GitHub pull requests, and deployment workflows operate gave me a much clearer picture of how the web works.

Ironically, that journey made me appreciate Bubble even more.

Bubble has been saving us from having to think about so much infrastructure complexity. A lot of the things developers spend time configuring manually are already handled for us. Meanwhile, someone fully relying on AI-generated code still needs to understand enough to instruct the AI correctly or troubleshoot when things inevitably break.

And let’s be honest — we’re starting to recognize AI-generated products. The familiar Tailwind styling, the purple gradients, the similar layouts and structures. Right now, AI is excellent for landing pages, waitlists, prototypes, and getting ideas off the ground quickly. At the same time, the advancements are real, and ignoring them would be a mistake.

What I always enjoyed most about Bubble was focusing on proper database design, reusable elements, performance optimization, and privacy rules. Once you understand those fundamentals, building becomes incredibly enjoyable.

That said, as apps scale, there is a valid concern around additional functionality. Plugin developers have contributed enormously to the ecosystem, but every new capability often comes with extra costs — plugins, storage, workload units, and so on. Sometimes you’re forced to either custom-build a solution or purchase one, which requires additional skills and investment.

My overall conclusion is that Bubble builders should invest time in learning coding fundamentals and web infrastructure concepts. Not necessarily to become full-time developers, but to provide more value, especially if you’re operating as a freelancer or agency. Understanding how the web works makes you a much stronger Bubble developer.

The reality is that there are fewer Bubble clients today than there were a few years ago, and we need to adapt to that reality rather than ignore it.

My current view is this:

If AI and no-code tools are becoming our new workforce, let’s be creative with them. Let’s use them to build products, solve problems, and create value — not just rely on them as a source of employment opportunities.

The builders who will thrive are the ones who combine AI, no-code, and technical understanding into something greater than any one tool alone.

24

Honestly if they built something that took in vibe code and converted it to bubble’s system. Yeah that could be pretty powerful…

Would be pretty wild if I could go and vibecode a part of the project and just port it into my app. As long as it works better than the Figma to Bubble converter lol

25

Well, the whole subject of marketing can be quite lengthy because it covers so many things.

But, it’s definitely, in my opinion, the future.

I mean, a lot of apps are internal apps a company uses…

you can add things like charts that show time saved, reduced errors, cost reduction, and on and on. Things that let the user see what you’re helping with.

Apps a company might want for their customers… You can help with landing pages, etc.

So many things.

Referral program… which I built in my app on Bubble. Saves the customer a couple of hundred or thousands a month. If a company, for example, was going to spend $1000 to advertise, a referral program would be more profitable where you gave the thousand dollars to customers instead. Friends trust friends more, and you get more mileage out of your buck.

Loyalty Card. I built a loyalty card system in my app. That saves the merchant money every month and helps retain customers. A user will happily pay for things that help them be successful.

Just so many things an agency can suggest and do to help their customers succeed.

Helping your customers succeed helps your agency grow in more ways than one.

But, as I said, the whole marketing conversation has a lot of angles. When you help your customer succeed and show them they’re succeeding, you’re appreciated more.

So, this is just a few examples of marketing without going into the whole discussion

26

In my own business we faced massive challenge from ai. We sell songs & vocals written & recorded by professional artists. Then Ai music apps like Suno appeared and changed the game completely - at the touch of a button (or prompt) a great sounding song can be generated by anyone :astonished_face:. We found ourselves suddenly having to justify our very existence.

The cool thing is that as the ai hype settled, the direction things are going in, is that all those ai music creators are ending up with a harddrive full of songs, and no idea what to do with them. Releasing them leads to stigma and copyright issues. Not to mention that they have a certain “sound” that people are starting to recognise (like how AI websites often look a certain way).

We actually started getting creators coming to us to help them get their ai demos recorded “properly” by a human. We realised there was a whole new business sat there so are now offering it as a service!(Turn AI Demos Into Human Vocals | AI Revocal Service)

I feel there are parallels here with bubble & vibe coding. Founders may vibe code to get ideas in place, then have it rebuilt “properly” in bubble. There’s potentially a big new fertile market there - if advertised right so that people could clearly understand the benefits of doing so.

Saying this however, the link I just shared above was not made with bubble :sob:. It SHOULD have been, and I truly wish it was - but bubbles page load speed & SEO issues forced me to make these static pages outside of bubble… Which shows that bubble still needs to upgrade a few core foundations before it can truly compete, but I have faith they will. And as another testament to bubbles capabilities, these static pages are MANAGED by bubble: I created a whole admin area for publishing & managing the non-bubble static SEO pages! It handles crawlers, LLMs, robots, everything. So that shows bubbles flexibility & strength!

27

Not in the music industry like you are…

And congrats, that’s a cool field.

But, don’t most people put a song with a face?

Like they hear a song and get into the person?

Just curious.

To clarify: Do people just follow a channel with no human face behind it with an AI song? Seems odd to me

28

When I started coaching 4 or 5 years ago, it was nonstop clients. I could have booked out every single hour of the day with coaching sessions. Even outside of coaching, I’d get 3-5 unsolicited leads in my inbox (LinkedIn, Twitter, here on the forums) every single week.

One of the primary reasons I started planning events for Bubblers was so I could meet more people I could refer clients to. There was so much work, it was overwhelming.

In the past two months, I think I’ve had three new coaching clients. THREE.

LinkedIn is crickets. Twitter - which used to be so fun for this community - has become a place where people mock you for still using Bubble. I’ve just taken it off my phone at this point b/c it’s too sad to go there. Even my chats with fellow Bubble devs have become (literally) depressing because they’re just dropping like flies.

For a while, I thought that those of us who are left would benefit from a shrinking talent pool. And while I did see a spike a few months ago, my flow of new clients - serious ones with actual budgets - has dried up almost completely. At this point, I am actively learning new skills and looking for additional sources of income so that I can make a living.

I’m sure there are a million reasons for this situation - and my guess is that the biggest ones are outside of Bubble’s control. (Do any of us really think that better UX, or workflow branching, or JSON handling would have given Bubble any leg up in this market? As much as I want those things, I honestly doubt it.)

I do think there will probably be a chunk of the market who either does not want to use AI, or who values the control and visibility that Bubble gives its users. So I expect (and hope) that Bubble will be around for a while. But if the professionals in this space can no longer make a living, and we all just dribble away (which is happening now)… and if the best educators leave the space (which they already have)… the large majority of the founders building on Bubble will not be able to finish their apps.

Without us, I truly don’t see how Bubble becomes competitive again. The platform is just too hard to learn for the average person. (And no, from what I’ve seen, the AI agent is not helping with this.)

So - I don’t know. I hope Bubble figures out a way to make the platform more relevant and support the professionals who still want to use it. I plan to stick around as long as there are clients who need me. But if I’m realistic about things, a Bubble-only career is looking less and less sustainable in the long run.

29

@heythere

I completely understand what you’re saying, and I think your perspective is probably shared by a lot of Bubble professionals right now.

For what it’s worth, my experience over the past 4 weeks has been very different from what I expected. A few weeks ago, I was seriously considering hiring a Bubble developer to help me develop and refine our solutions. The timing turned out to be strange but almost perfect, because I discovered that with AI, Codex, Buildprint, and Bubble together, I can now work with what feels like several developers helping me almost at the same time, for a fraction of the daily cost.

But I don’t think that means Bubble professionals are no longer needed. I think the expertise is shifting.

In my opinion, your expertise could become even more valuable if it moves toward Bubble + AI: how the two work together, where they fit well, where the integration is difficult, how to avoid AI mistakes, and how to structure Bubble apps so AI can work on them safely.

Right now, I barely touch the Bubble editor anymore, except for visual validation, spot checks, and discovering places where AI/Buildprint writes something that Bubble does not fully like. I still check regularly, because AI makes mistakes and those mistakes can also cost a lot of time. But when the context is good, it is honestly incredible.

The missing piece, in my opinion, is logs. If Bubble gave fast, efficient access to small server log windows, the feedback loop would become almost instant. I experienced that a few days ago, and it completely changed the debugging process. The AI could see where the problem was, reason through it, and suggest or apply a correction very quickly.

I’ve worked with programmers before, and I don’t think anyone can match AI on speed, writing, iteration, and reasoning when the context is clean. But that’s the key: the context has to be clean, the workflow has to be structured, and someone still needs to know what is real, what is risky, and what Bubble actually accepts.

That’s where I think people like you still matter a lot.

Founders are going to need guides who understand both worlds: Bubble and AI. Not just “how to build an app,” but how to build with AI without getting buried in noise, wrong assumptions, broken workflows, and expensive mistakes.

So I agree that a Bubble-only career may be harder to sustain. But Bubble + AI expertise might become a very valuable niche, especially for people who already understand the platform deeply.

30

The question is, if you were starting your project from scratch today. Would you choose Bubble to build it?

At the moment we are in the “Stone Age” of AI and AI coding. The tools out there will continue to rapidly advance and improve every day/week/month. I don’t feel the same from the Bubble side.

For those that already have established apps built on Bubble, I think they will still need to be maintained. But the total number of these established apps decreases daily.

A developer, just like like AI needs to train & learn from their experiences. With less apps to build, there will less experience out there. The gap will only then get wider as time goes on.

Edit: I would be interested if Bubble has the data of the age range of the users on the platform. I wouldn’t be surprised if it is the same 25yr + who have been using it and not the new generation of developers.

31

For me, Bubble has been the springboard and my first real baptism into “easy coding.”

Is Bubble perfect? No. After all these years, am I sometimes tempted to build with other tools and pay less? Yes.

But at the end of the day, the real question is simple: which tool allows me to accomplish what I need, move fast, and resell or monetize the solution quickly?

To me, that is not only a Bubble issue. It is also a marketing, positioning, and profitability issue. If the product makes money and the platform helps me move fast, the cost becomes much easier to justify.

When I pay my Bubble bill, I ask myself a few questions: am I still happy supporting the founders who also supported me through their platform? Are the current prices reasonable compared to my profits? Is this tool still helping me move faster than the alternatives?

Those are the questions that matter most to me.

I also think the future is very hard to predict. My feeling is that we may eventually move toward a different kind of language, not exactly the programming languages we know today. It may become more of an “AI language,” where AI handles security, optimization, speed, multitasking, and execution, while humans work with visual blocks and higher-level logic, similar in spirit to Bubble and other visual tools.

So for now, I still see Bubble as an important bridge. Maybe not perfect, maybe not the cheapest, but still a powerful way to build, test, sell, and learn quickly.

32

Fantastic discussion, I really appreciate everyone being constructive. A lot of good points.

I think it’s fair to say that a significant portion of the Bubble community is looking for action. That’s why I would like to point you all to this upcoming livestream with Emmanuel and Josh next week where they’ll showcase the latest upgrades to the product:

33

Hello Kelly,

Big fan of yours, here, so I say the following with the utmost respect:

I totally would have been a client of yours / a candidate for coaching because I want to stick with Bubble forever, but Buildprint has made that completely unnecessary.

I have become a better developer and have not needed to sacrifice one minute or dollar outside of my actual development time.

Thank you for all of your amazing work you’ve done for the community!

34

I agree, I love Bubble. I have spent more time building apps on Bubble than I’ve done anything else in my entire life…

But how much of that statement is just your knowledge of the platform. I am sure if you had the same experience with another tool you would feel the same.

I am going to continue to still build with Bubble and maintain all my client’s apps as long as they are here. But like @heythere stated, I think its wise for everyone to do the same

35

Well, some of these comments can be a little depressing…

Like, “I need to learn new skills to make money.”

I mean, don’t people build apps on Bubble and make money anymore?

There are still a ton of apps that are new and making money.

Why is the only way to make money on Bubble seems to be coaching someone who may be building an app and making some money?

A little confusing actually… but maybe that’s where we are with Bubble these days

36

Didn’t you also recommend learning new skills? By learning new skills doesn’t mean learning new platforms. But new ways to help your clients or the community.

37

By learning new skills, you broaden your usefulness.

Learning new skills doesn’t mean learning every platform. I’m familiar with a lot of platforms, but I can still use the same concepts on each one.

Expanding your thinking is crucial when it comes to success

38

Yes i think this is the crux… It’s hard to know if the number of people using bubble has dropped or not but one thing is guaranteed: the number of people needing expert help to use bubble certainly has. Because the LLMs are like having an expert on your team 24/7.

It’s not just bubble though…for example we now use Ai for checking legal contracts whereas before we would have paid for a lawyer. Ai images whereas before we may have hired a photographer. A few months ago i was looking at hiring a bubble freelancer - now buildprint/ai has done all those tasks for me already.

It makes me feel very conflicted & hypocritical - on one hand it’s empowering and exciting (using buildprint truly feels like a superpower) on the other it’s hurting the careers of skilled good people. :cry: I don’t know what the answer is but i guess we have to somehow adapt and hope that some kind of new balance emerges that everyone can benefit from. :crossed_fingers:t3:

39

You nailed it! I have a Law Degree from one of the best schools in Canada and I wouldn’t consider getting back in to law or telling my children to work in law ever again.

I have never been a freelancer / Dev for other people, so I feel for those making a living on Bubble as Devs for hire. I just make my own humble apps on Bubble and elsewhere for my own entrepreneurial ventures.

I got into Bubble and cut my teeth through Matt Neary’s thinkitbuildit.co after having a good decade long attempt at the many and ever-changing Full-Stack frameworks (my first was Ruby on Rails :folded_hands: ). And I would continually refer to and Neary’s TIBI, contribute to his Discord… but not anymore!

That’s what makes me optimistic that perhaps we are getting to the place where Bubble first envisioned of turning any person into a (successful) solopreneur if they have a good enough company.

I know I wouldn’t trust myself on platforms other than Bubble to actually ship products – I’m not a good enough dev for that – but I do feel pretty secure in my current Bubble + Buildprint stack.

40

@fede.bubble could we maybe get an updated version of this post from early 2024, to give insights into trends from first half 2026?

Any possibility on insights into traffic numbers in terms of new users, new builds, new subscribes? Would be helpful maybe to some details on where people are coming to bubble from, why, what they are building and what they need help with.