WU Cost Exploded

pieter.vanrensburg · 2025-03-07T15:07:49.482Z

pieter.vanrensburg:

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The ticket has been submitted. It is rather concerning that official Bubble communication around the matter has not been forthcoming. If I have a SQL issue, then odds are everyone has.
Under the WU model one would assume Bubble has certain checks built into their IT Control Frameworks to pick up spikes and irregularities. WU is after all virtual money to them.

So, is Bubble trying to pull a fast one and do EXACTLY what I said they would do 2 years ago or are their Support and PR departments just not on their A game?

bcart0v · 2025-03-07T15:09:17.978Z

Also same here, I preformed a back end workflow that, by Bubble’s pricing should have only used around 11,000 WU’s, but ended up using 47,000. I made a change to 4,000 records and didn’t think I would use even close to that.

I haven’t messaged support yet but I’m going to.

ahmed.elkaffas · 2025-03-07T17:02:54.933Z

Yes !! I have noticed this in one of my applications few days ago. Surprisingly, the same backend workflow that runs on nearly the same amount of data and the WU consumption hiked from around 4,500~5,000 WU to around 8500~9000 WU !!

mghatiya · 2025-03-07T17:05:56.005Z

I’ll do a +1 here. I experienced hike in WU usages too. I just thought that maybe it could be related to some workflows I ran, but on back of my mind I knew that I had not run it so many times and not for as many days as I am seeing the hike in WU usage.

But it is so hard to quickly point out what’s going wrong to be able to raise any bug report etc.

Pricing being on the basis of WUs is so very risky due to all these. Bugs can easily work heavily against us without costing anything to Bubble.

ahmed.elkaffas · 2025-03-09T13:04:42.479Z

Thanks @fede.bubble !
I have submitted a support ticket.

lcoopcooperl · 2025-03-09T21:47:22.193Z

Experiencing the exact same thing. Daily WU used to be around 7-8k for us. Now suddenly they’re reaching 15-20k for no discernible reasons.

john.nam · 2025-03-10T14:49:13.266Z

Thanks for pointing this out. I also noticed a sudden surge starting from the Feb 28th as well. My app’s WU usage is about 2-3 times more than what it used to be before?

ihsanzainal84 · 2025-03-11T02:47:27.562Z

Just checked my apps. Noticed the same thing, increased in average daily WU usage. Noticed the upticks happening after the server downtime. Not as much as 2-3 times but a noticeable increase versus historical data.

pieter.vanrensburg · 2025-03-12T09:22:25.348Z

Well, the issue has been resolved for me and a credit it seems is on its way. Is it a full credit for all days where we had issues? No, but at least they are crediting the day when things went really pear shaped, which should put us below our 3Mil WU budget.

After 2 weeks of having my devs focusing exclusively on optimizing WU we can get back to adding value to the business.

thethinklab.au · 2025-03-12T10:34:22.117Z

Was there an official response/explanation from Bubble on this?

pieter.vanrensburg · 2025-03-12T14:06:54.271Z

Just that the issue was resolved and that a request for credit was submitted. Honestly, as someone that has put the fate of our company in an ERP built on Bubble, I do not consider the response received comforting, but life cannot always be sunshine and roses, can it?

boston85719 · 2025-03-12T15:00:13.394Z

pieter.vanrensburg:

Just that the issue was resolved and that a request for credit was submitted

I wonder how many other apps were affected whose owners/devs didn’t detect the spike and didn’t request credit.

Seems strange that there are bugs in WUs metrics and charges, I mean who would have guessed it? The main issue with WUs pricing is that at any given moment Bubble can introduce a bug inadvertently that can do this type of damage to their reputation and their trust factor.

It is a shame they didn’t have the foresight to make WUs a priority and ensure it is Bug free and any updates would likely not introduce bugs to the system.

Did you ever isolate if the issue only affected activities associated with SQL or did it affect other native functions in Bubble?

thethinklab.au · 2025-03-12T21:11:26.441Z

@fede.bubble can you please work with bubble to get an official explanation on this, along with what is being done to?:

a) Prevent this from happening again
b) Detect similar issues in the future, and be forthcoming to your users on what has happened

We deserve it.

pieter.vanrensburg · 2025-03-13T06:29:21.904Z

From my analyses it seems only workloads interacting with SQL was affected.

sem · 2025-03-13T08:21:45.811Z

I always had the idea that Microsoft can do it, Sap can do it, Oracle can do it but Bubble? Actually a very positive sign when companies view Bubble as a rock solid trusted partner for these types of products! Good to hear that they credited you.

ahmed.elkaffas · 2025-03-24T16:14:31.520Z

Well my issue has been resolved after opening a ticket with the support team. They calculated the extra WUs and sent them to me to validate (I had an extra of around 15K WUs) and after my confirmation, they waived these extra WUs and now everything looks good !

fede.bubble · 2025-03-24T17:39:27.802Z

Hi everyone
After allowing a few days for the team to put together a postmortem, I wanted to share the following with you in the hopes that it answers everyone’s questions:

What happened

Between Feb 27 and March 7 routine infrastructure improvement work made some changes that caused scheduled workflows using dynamic lists to behave inconsistently. This caused multiple issues like delays in workflow execution and slightly incorrect WU usages for some users.

Resolution

Thanks to user reports the team was made aware of these issues and a fix was shipped by March 6. The team has now added additional safeguards and tests to prevent regressions like this in the future. The team is also reviewing our escalation processes to improve response speed moving forward.

If you believe you were affected by this I highly recommend that you get in touch with our support team and mention this thread so they can take a look and offer any help you may need.

Thanks all!

boston85719 · 2025-04-03T08:08:07.145Z

So bugs are indeed capable of creeping into the system and causing WU costs to be higher than they should be?

ed19 · 2025-04-03T08:21:27.026Z

We ended up paying $50 which is negligible so whatever, I thought our app was just busier because we had many active campaigns. Spiked from 400k avg usage to about 1.2m

pieter.vanrensburg · 2025-04-03T09:26:09.748Z

I just watched an interesting video discussing ethical leadership. It brought my mind back to this discussion. Do I want to do business where I have vendor lock in when that vendor does not behave in a way, I think is Ethical? You paid $50 to which Bubble is not entitled. How many other people also ended up paying more than they should? If a vendor wants to charge for consumption, do they not have a moral obligation to their customers to do a full and proper investigation and to credit their customers regardless of a complaint being lodged? Anyways this is an academic discussion.

I have done the research, and I still have my team doing research. Dollar for Dollar there is no alternate to Bubble. They probably know this as well as we do hence their chosen path of action.