Wu cost a issue?

Questions
1

While ago I released a new product called WU reducer (you can find it on https://wureducer.com/). My assumption was that:

  • a lot of bigger app’s wanted to reduce their WU usage
  • that lot of apps are using XANO because of that WU usage
  • that most WU’s are consumed as read operations

I started talking to agencies and most of my told that customers don’t care/complain about WU usage. That they just pay for WU packs if needed.

But I also see a lot of people using XANO and other backends to reduce WU usage. So I was wondering, is this a problem worth investing my time in (and can I charge for that)?

Would love to hear your thoughts on it!

2 Likes
2

For SaaS no, but for apps where users can do a lot without paying (e.g marketplaces) yes, it is a bigger issue

1 Like
3

But would it be a issue, thats big enough to avoid? I am thinking that it would be only for B2C apps?

4

I could see myself using it on like 10% of apps. Many people won’t. I don’t know if enough people would use it to justify the development time for you

2 Likes
5

It probably goes without saying that I have my finger on the pulse of the forum aspect of the Bubble community as well as anyone these days, and as much as I dig what you’re doing, Ab, I haven’t seen much from the forum lately that would indicate that folks would be willing to pay for this service. Sure, plenty of folks will geek out about it (and rightly so), but would they take the time to implement it and pay you on an ongoing basis to save tens or hundreds of dollars per year? I doubt it, and if it helps to know this at all, I definitely wouldn’t use it.

Take all of this fanboy talk for what it’s worth, but I don’t think WU is really a thing anymore (with the exception of certain issues that the community has done a fantastic job of documenting for Bubble), and it only seems to pop up from folks who still haven’t gotten past the fact that Bubble changed their pricing model, and it costs more to use the platform these days. That being said, anyone who has been around for a while knows it always should have cost more (and a lot more) to use the platform because of the value it provides. True, Bubble created their own problem by giving it away for free or essentially free in the early days to grow their user base. But, anyone who was paying attention knew that wouldn’t last forever, and of course, it didn’t.

What I find most interesting about what folks like, for example, you and Flusk are doing is what I mentioned above… while it’s going to get a lot of attention, will folks actually pay for your services? I’m guessing you are already seeing that they won’t, hence your question in this thread.

At the end of the day, money that would be going to Bubble is now going to you (and yes, it’s less money, but still), but now folks have introduced another layer into the equation that needs to be managed and that could bring other issues to the table (for example, one third-party platform pushed an update a while back that deleted all of the plugins for some of their users). If you follow the forum at all these days, you know the vast majority of the users are a million miles away from understanding how to integrate Xano or any other third-party platform/service into their app, and if we’re being honest, who’s to say you won’t raise your prices down the line or possibly discontinue your service at some point, and now folks have to be concerned about that stuff, too.

Anyway, I will digress at this point, and apologies for the long-winded reply. I am fascinated by the topic, though, and while I wish you the best with this service, I’m with George in that I don’t think it’s going to be worth it for you in the long run.

10 Likes
6

Thanks for your reply! Really appreciate it coming from you.

This really helps me validate that wureducer is not a good business idea. Maybe just keep it around as a free tool to generate leads for CoAlias.

I also did searches on the forum and seems like the issue of WUs has been almost reduces to nothing like you are saying.

Didnt think of doing that :slight_smile:

2 Likes
7

One thing you should remember - only 8 months left until unlimited legacy plans will be demolished and all apps will be forcibly transferred to new pricing model (WU).
I suppose the vast majority of apps are still using legacy plans. So there can be a room for your service in the end of this year :slight_smile:

3 Likes
8

Didn’t think of that. Still feels like people care more about easy building process (that bubble provides) instead of cost reduction. That page / data loading speads might be a better proposition!

9

That is what I will say… There are probably thousands of people who have no idea that they will need to reduce their WU amounts until the first invoice arrives…

But on the other hand, I think it’s a matter of time before users adapt and start to be able to design applications that consume fewer and fewer WUs. Not to mention Bubble itself, which will most likely use more intelligent scripts and tools to keep this under control…

2 Likes
10

Well here’s some quick estimations:

Most users do care about the price, but won’t have the technical knowledge to implement caching. That reduces your pool by at least 90%. We now have 10% of Bubble apps as potential users.

Of the users that would be willing to do it (experienced devs, agencies), only 10-20% of their apps might benefit from it. We now have 1-2% of all Bubble apps as potential users.

Let’s suppose it costs $120 of development time to integrate. The number of apps that would be able to save $120 using WU Reducer is likely even smaller, so you’re down to like <0.5% of all in-development Bubble apps (by in-development Bubble apps, I mean live apps that are self sustaining and businesses are actively using them. Bubble claims 3.3 mil apps but I’d be surprised if more than 50,000 are being actively used).

4 Likes
11

Sounds about right!

12

I’m fascinated by what you’ve done with this, but wonder if the focus is on the wrong messaging. Saving some WU is nice, but if it’s incremental, and most of that savings is then perceived as going to you instead of in pocket, it starts to seem like a hassle with minimal return.

However - if what you’ve done is implemented actual caching and leveraging Cloudflare tools for very fast initial page load, that is a focus I imagine B2C, blogs, etc would be interested in, mostly to avoid losing a client because the page didn’t load in time. If you’re able to focus on these tools instead, it does start to look like a more attractive proposition.

What I haven’t figured out yet is why Bubble apps are all protected by Cloudflare, but without any way for us to access those settings, enable caching, etc. If you re-tool your approach around this, it may be more successful. I’ll be launching my own app this year, and it’ll rely on SEO driven traffic with ad supported content to produce revenue- and I would love to decrease initial page load on mobile. If your tool can help with that, I’m certainly interested.

1 Like
13

This is the reason we don’t use CoAlias (although we’d love to!). Depending on a (relatively) small company for a core functionality of my apps is scary.

15

Everyone starts at zero. We do have a commitment that if we ever stopped business, we will open source it

16

Our business is a marketplace, and WU usage is a concern. I will happily check out your service. (I didn’t know about it till today.)

We are also looking at “Scious search” to help speed up and lower WU costs too. Would your plugin be able to work in conjunction with that? Or would they step on each other’s feet?

My only reservation is that the more ‘3rd party’ solutions we rely on, the more chance of things breaking or getting messy to maintain. Especially if Bubble then releases an update which conflicts with them.

Either way, much respect and appreciation for you guys for making these tools help the community.

Best
Dale

1 Like
17

You can combine both. Should not conflict

1 Like
18

I would be clearly interested by your plugin, not for WU cost reduction, but for SEO purpose. Bubble is not very good on the subject (slow page load, dynamic URL that can’t be removed from the sitemap etc.) and your solution seems to improve drastically the speed when the only operation consists of reading the dababase.

My two cents:
-It needs to be implemented on a page level, with possible exception by element, to make it easy to use.
-It would also be best to find a logic to rely entirely on Bubble or to let people set up resources on Azure/AWS/Google. If I have to go through your servers, it would be difficult for me to trust you regarding downtimes.

1 Like
19

I think there is a real need for such a solution, as it should have come from Bubble it self.
The idea is caching DB requests as long they are not user specific.
I would use it with whatever dashboard that present a lot of statistics and the proccessing is done client side. Regulary with Bubble.io it is almost not practicle and forces a developer to integrate some third party SAAS BI service.

The thing is that WU reducer implementation is not trasparent.

For me, if you can find a way, to:

  1. Put the Plugin on a page (not a must).
  2. Have it point to the CSS ID of a RG or a Group in which a "search for… " or any DB query request is being done.
  3. Somehow intervene as DB kind of CDN, and divert the request and return data through WU reducer.

For the developer implementation and revertion is trivial.

That is a solution worth investing in!

1 Like
21

Thanks for your feedback.

1 Like
22

For anyone interested, I am launching a new version of WUreducer.com focussed on page speed at Dev Day. It will be called PageRabbit.

Pagerabb.it
Showing a new tool that will allow you to increase the page speed of Bubble apps. It will load data much faster and with much less Workload Unit consumption.

Signup on https://devday.live/

2 Likes