You compared Bubble to Hosting & Deployment platforms like Vercel & AWS. Are they from the same category ? How was Bubble originally priced & working before introducing WU ? it was a subscription plan that includes already in it the cost of hosting & deployment since Bubble itself is built on AWS so why were WU introduced by a Development platform ?
When I say it doesn’t exist except in Bubble, that’s because I didn’t see it in any other Development platform of the same category whether front end or backend (Softr, Xano, FlutterFlow, WebFlow, etc..) where you’re charged more the more your application is used by the development platform itself.
I might didn’t clarify enough what I mean. Hope this makes sense.
Regarding the “export code”, I agree with you, I don’t expect it will happen in Bubble. although it exists in similar development platforms (Like FlutterFlow, WebStudio, Raydian for example).
@randomanon My point is not to argue on technicality or Bubble’s capabilities, I just don’t understand the business model anymore. I don’t see a direction and it’s been a while. IMO, Bubble is really powerful thanks to its awesome community members like you. If Bubble keeps putting aside our opinions and feedback, then I am curious to know what are Bubble priorities.
By the way, WU is just an example, however go to the idea board and see how many ideas have high votes for how long without progress. People have been looking forward to seeing “formatted as JSON” and yet it’s not there although that’s an easy one. Beta features stay in Beta for months. Is this pace acceptable in today’s era where companies ship updates every few weeks ? Please check out the posts related to support issues opened for weeks.I personally had a support ticket open with the support for days although it was submitted by a customer on a “Dedicated Server” where we should expect a faster response. This is not the level of support expected by enterprises. This is not to mention the platform stability issues especially in the beginnings of 2025 although this one has improved significantly in the past few months.
More users develop on Bubble → The more probablity there will be applications that will grow & scale → The more coaching & Bubble developers they will need when things get more complex → The more paying customers Bubble will have in higher plan.
Everybody wins. it’s as simple as that.
I hope I am mistaken, however only time will tell. Whether we’ll see more “Bubble Developer Needed” posts here on the forum (that’s what we all love to see) OR we’ll see more “Bubble Developer Available”.
I totally agree with you on this.
I believe we have different definitions for “lock in”
Bubble can be considered an AWS reseller. Meaning there is a literal COGS tied to usage and it’s impossible to disconnect that from their pricing.
Hosting is only a small part of Bubble’s overall product, but it’s a central one.
You can read about it here: Plans & Billing (legacy) | Bubble Docs
There was no magic infinite usage, you had to pay for more “Capacity.”
Looks like usage based pricing to me, just disguised slightly better.
Trust me, I’ve written novels about the ways Bubble has let itself down, you can check every monthly announcement thread. Specifically I’ve talked about JSON handling here:
Supposedly this is finally coming out (I think in a few days actually). Better late than never, but only because we delivered realistic feedback.
I’m just saying, choose your battles wisely and don’t ask for something that will never happen, it just creates noise (I hate this term but it’s apt here).
Was the app taken down after exceeding its capacity like in the WU ?
I am not fighting. No battles at all. I am just saying my opinion. in fact just the feeling that something will never happen even if you talk about it summarizes it all.
Does this affect performance (i.e rate-limiting or performance degradation) ?? or take the whole backend down if it exceeds a specific limit ?
WU doesn’t change anything related to performance (and is also better than the old “Capacity” stuff.). About turned down, this is a choice you made. You can activate overages to avoid this. And yes, a lot of theses tools could limit you from creating new DB rows, new user, workflows, upload files and so on… based on their pricing. This is not different from Bubble. Just a different way to calculate and limit usage.
I know this about Bubble. I was asking about Xano.
@georgecollier before you head out 
I’ll give you a few examples of things I’ve been able to do with MCP/CLI. Some may not be 1:1 with bubble but it speaks to the volume of how far behind they’re falling.
- Create a google doc with a list of rough fields required to fully submit an app to both app stores. All I had to do was create the Apple dev account and grab keys. Everything up to submission was handled via an agent.
- Setup & Implement near any Google library from cloud console without touching the dashboard. Simply had to go review the setup.
- Create an entire supabase setup with webhooks, database structure with dev, staging, prod.
- Create a vercel hosting environment and setup all the environmental vars.
- Daily agentic log review of every connected platform that also provides URL to each dashboards logs so I can manually review.
- Create Cloudflare hosting, domain, R2 buckets, and edge worker setup. Again. No dashboard needed. Signup & keys. Short google doc plan.
- Twilio is a fun one because I’ve done this in bubble and it took over a week and 2 custom plugins, took 3 hours. setup an entire call forwarding, tracking, recording feature with webhooks, log review, twilio flows. Again…I didn’t have to touch the twilio dashboard outside of signing up and grabbing keys. Production app with roughly 1500 calls going through it a week.
- Stripe entire store setup with products, prices, webhooks, etc. The slow part used to be navigating the dashboard, adding these in one by one, checking docs to make sure my structure was correct for use case, etc. Now it was a Google doc sent to Claude code then reviewing the setup.
People always speak on the mistakes AI makes, it’s going to, and probably always will because it can’t read your mind but it’s not a senior dev, it’s your dev partner.
Imagine if bubble had an account or app CLI/MCP. Building a custom plugin for an app would be a Google doc plan. Structuring a decent size database or option set would take minutes not hours. App Workflows would be review and testing, not weeks of building.
Due to how fast the market has changed building here feels like the Stone Age. It’s not like bubble didn’t get the funding…they received a series A that was larger than most and they are having platforms that popped up recently with much smaller teams and funding outpace them.
to be very clear, I’m not “anti bubble” I love this platform, if they were to get a bit more on par with the market it could be one of the best tools tools to exist. There’s no other platform that I’m aware of that could close the gap between code, visual building, and AI allowing non tech founders to have control how they want while still utilizing AI. IF their ai ever gets remotely decent. as of now, most fly blind with code they don’t understand.
100% Agree, but this is only direct impact of bad performance, indirectly it reduces the speed of iteration, such as you can’t use most of the plugins.
Here is a nice example too, lower performance = lower version-test load = lower iteration speed.
This is very sad. @heythere you made the first tutorial I watched when starting with bubble years ago.
I’m a huge bubble fan. I quit my full time sales job about 7 years ago to build an app. I accidentally found bubble, built a software business, and it completely changed my life and career.
I hope bubble is around for a long time. I’ve been wanting a native mobile companion app to go along with my web app. I first built it complete in bubble’s native app, but was waiting too long for features. When claude code had it’s moment around the 2025 holidays I built the companion native app in claude code.
Half of our product’s surface area is still in bubble. When we need to edit code in the bubble half it feels way more time consuming…and I still use claude to walk me through step-by-step to build in bubble (even though I’m really good in bubble).
I used to get upset when bubble would focus on AI Hype instead of shipping features the native app needed. Now I get it. They had to focus on it…they needed/need to pivot.
I like this…I don’t want to migrate the web app half of our product off bubble. But to stay ahead of my competition i need to move quick. Building in bubble is a bottle-neck right now.
I’m back on the forum today because I was wondering how much time I have before I’m forced to migrate. I’m scared to get an email from bubble saying they shut down.
I agree that there’s new opportunity, and I hope bubble finds it.
that’s why I use so much now the george’s BuildPrint ! a real IA impact
Have you used Buildprint?
yeah most of these kinds of problems are solved problems with Buildprint which is the CLI + MCP for Bubble 
+1 on this.
Which got me thinking…if Claude is doing most of the thinking and building, and Bubble is mostly where we go to spot-check things, then are we really “Bubbling” anymore?
This thread highlights Bubble’s problem: Buildprint is great, but it also exposes the issue pretty clearly: The best thing happening in the Bubble ecosystem right now is a tool that helps serious builders avoid the Bubble editor as much as possible!
Meanwhile, Bubble still thinks the editor is the moat.
And once Claude has a decent visual editor around it (which is inevitable), what is Bubble’s real moat?
And the fact that this has not really happened yet says something. I don’t think there’s a massive group of developers sitting around wishing Claude had a Bubble-style drag-and-drop editor. Anyone building more than a basic CRUD app, or some pretty spaghetti mess, is probably going to get used to talking to Claude directly, reviewing what it produces, and using visual tools only where they actually help.
The visual layer still matters somewhat, but mostly for inspection and cleanup. But not as the center of the building experience.
From.my point of view, this is the advantage of Bubble vs different tools or directly AI. If AI fail, it’s easy with the editor to continue to build or fix thing where AI struggle and also avoid breaking other part of the app, something that happen often in a lot of differents AI app builder. Also, AI could cost a lot when building and you can run out of tokens but can continue to build in Bubble even if you don’t know code.
I’m reaching for buildprint more and more recently - the thought of manually constructing many of the complex conditions & expressions is no longer appealing, and it’s a massive time saver.
However, the thought of NOT having the design editor at hand would be horrifying. 90% of what the ai produces, design wise, needs manual fixing. For a competent designer, it’s faster to build layout (and add basic workflows) manually. Of course you can “micro-prompt” endlessly until a design is just right but it’s a waste of time & energy (but design, like anything, is a skill and many app builders don’t have it and so prompting may be preferable & faster).
The best results imo come from the combination of both worlds. I recently built a really nice looking sign-up screen - the initial layout & theme was created manually then buildprint took over and created additional tabs & wired up workflows (such as “turn the borders red on any invalid fields”). Final checks & fixes were done manually. A nice human+ai combo teamwork.
I believe it’s simply about reaching for the best tool for the job at the time, and the fact that bubble has it’s design editor so well integrated is simply a massive bonus & blessing - acts as a “source of truth” and essential to the whole experience & appeal of bubble.
Will other tools gain graphical editors? - for sure! I’ve predicted since day one that every web app design system will end up a very similar, borrowing the best parts of each other & adding their own twist & flavour on things. That’s the way it goes with any software or product… It’s healthy competition that keeps driving innovation & there’s room on the market for more than one. 
This conversation seems to imply that demand for bubble developers has decreased considerably and anything bubble could do to attract new customers is focused on AI improvement which doesn’t lead in an increase in demand for bubble developers, just an increase in demand for tokens.
Some have pointed out if you understand how to implement business logic into the app, you may be better off than other developers who just take directions from client on what features to build, but still not going to get back to pre-2025 demand levels.
Is there anything bubble could do to improve the prospects of having a career as a bubble developer other than state Day 2, the ongoing maintenance or bug fixing? Is there a way for bubble to target a potential client base that is more inclined to pay for the development and ongoing maintenance and expansion so they can focus on actually building their business? We’ve heard a few already state they have built a business and are now using Buildprint instead of hiring a developer. So as Bubble gets their AI up to snuff, where are the clients bubble could bring in to help the concept of ‘a rising tide lifts all ships’?