Million Labs helps non tech founders to Start, Launch & Grow an app, via our Startup Lab we have helped over 1400 founders launch something using Bubble.io so we have seen everything and have experience that is probably second to none in the market. This is our summary of the impact that the Bubble pricing changes will make

On Thursday 6th April Bubble.io announced their latest price changes, this comes on two previously announced price changes in the last 3 years. The previous price changes were both badly handled and both rolled back.

Bubble has always until now been a bargain and a price increase was both understood to be coming and needed, being part of the Bubble ecosystem we want Bubble to be sustainable after all that's in all our interest. It was not sustainable to go on charging their low prices that was clear, some customers of Bubble were making more money using the Bubble platform than Bubble was from all their customers, this is unsustainable.

Here is a summary of our thoughts:

- Price increases were expected and required

- The metric chosen is the correct one

- The role out of the pricing change is rushed, ill thought out and badly communicated

- Trust of Bubble has taken a significant blow

- Startups may no longer be the target customer for Bubble

- We expect/hope Bubble will make some changes to these plans

3rd time lucky 🍀

Bubble has been searching for a metric that was fair and scaled the price charged with a customers growing use of the platform. Last year they thought that metric was entries in the database but the logic here was very clearly flawed and didn't mirror a customers success with the cost.

Imagine a Startup with a very large data set but no revenue vs a startup who holds almost no data but has large revenues, this data metric was very clearly not going to do the job. At the time the community was very clear in pointing this out and it did lead to a bit of head scratching of how Bubble couldn't see that before launching that Strategy.

At the time they said they would delay the price increase while they consulted with the community and came up with a more suitable metric, we were consulted so did have input, however we were not re-consulted once a metric was chosen to understand the impact. We suspect nobody was consulted on the actual Metric.

The Metric 📈

The Metric chosen is a thing called Workload units, this is not unique many organisations use a similar metric for charging such as Amazon Web Service (the platform upon which Bubble sits). You can think of it like an electricity meter, the more you use the more you are charged.

In theory this is a great metric as the more users you have on your app the more work the app will be doing and this will be closer aligned to revenue (for most business models). So broadly speaking Bubble got this right. Here are the new Bubble pricing details.