Ever since Bubble announced their new pricing change, users reacted angrily and furiously to the changes, with 2k+ comments on the forum and even Bubble's founder received death threats:

A day ago, Bubble announced adjustments to their pricing system, raising app limits and making calculations more transparent. Most users have observed initial reductions of 10x from the previous pricing.

While the community has mostly calmed down, people remain cautious and the brand loyalty to Bubble has definitely taken a hit.

Personally, I believe that Bubble remains the most powerful nocode tool in the market by far, and it will take a few years for any competitor to catch up. However, more crucial than ever, to build a successful app in Bubble, here are 3 questions you need to ask yourself:

1. What is my budget?

Currently, you can go to your Logs tab to see how much workload you are using and compare it with the subscription planner provided by Bubble.

However, if you are just starting out on a free plan, it will be tough to estimate as there are no reliable benchmarks right now. I suggest for you to just start building and observe your usage statistics after 30 days.

The good thing is that all paid apps have 100k free development WUs per month, which will incentivise creators to not worry too much when doing development and testing.

2. Who am I building this for?

Some communities, like the Brazil Bubblers, have been greatly impacted by the pricing change. With the move to workload-based pricing, this means that some use cases will also become less viable:

a. Internal app with no paying users

b. Public facing app with many free user visits but low value per paid user

c. Apps that require frequent realtime updates

d. Creating apps for business clients (high pricing risk)

e. Creators in third-world countries with high currency conversion costs.

3. What is my monetization/exit strategy?

It's been no secret that Bubble has been underpriced for very long. Usage was not capped and some users have generated large profits while not contributing to Bubble's server costs.

Now, you need to plan out a monetization roadmap so that you won't run out of money with a growth in users. This means more spreadsheets and calculations on break-even points and value/user.

The other thing to take note is that Bubble remains a proprietary platform.

A user in the forum shared about losing a "$10 million exit opportunity fall through because of Bubble and the lack of code export."

So if you intend to ever sell off your app, you may want to move off Bubble once you raise enough funds to exit the MVP stage.

What is Bubble's future?

Right now, my biggest worry is the loss in trust in Bubble. Many long-time users and plugin developers have committed to looking out for other alternatives, and the community support might suffer as a results.

While it's too early to predict anything, Bubble's founders - Josh and Emmanuel - remain committed to keeping costs reasonable for users. They have greatly reduced API costs(the biggest bugbear) and offered 1-1 support to users to discuss optimization for apps.

Therefore, I will still put my trust in Bubble to do users right - the potential of nocode is limitless and Bubble is still the most powerful tool by far!

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I will be sharing more optimization tips as Bubble releases more information on pricing.

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