How to Understand Bubble’s Pricing

if you're thinking of building an app on Bubble pricing is something you're going to need to understand will you be able to afford running your app will you be able to monetize it will you actually be in control of your app's costs if you've already looked into bubbles pricing you may be confused by things like workload units which is how bubble measures your app's overall activity and thus cost to run in fact you may have found yourself hesitant to move forward with bubble at all because of how unpredictable and out of control these costs might seem rest assured however that with the details in this video you can make a logical decision about whether it makes sense to use bubble for your app and what to anticipate with pricing stick around until the end because we're also going to talk about reasons your costs could Spike and how to avoid them all right when it comes to Bubble pricing there's a variable component here you know not all apps are made equal so some are simpler some may require uh more processing power behind the scenes in order to work properly to perform well as well and this concept of variable pricing where you may be charged a dynamic amount every month is something you may have come across with other web applications and services for example with payment gateways like stripe or PayPal they will typically charge you a fee a percentage of every transaction um with email marketing they may charge you based off of the number of emails you're sending every month um right this is usage uh crms will typically charge you based off of the number of act contacts you maintain in your account on a monthly basis digital marketing like Google ads will typically charge you based off of cost per click or cost per Impressions so Bubble app is similar in that it's going to price you off of Usage Now their unit of measurement is called the workload unit and this contributes to your overall workload right and this is also measured on a monthly basis now put simply bubbles teex stack behind the scenes the servers the processing power all the resources is is responsible for powering your app's activity Now activity can mean a lot of different things searching your database making changes to your database uploading files communicating with API connections and some activity takes more work than others some are more resource intensive and so bubble is going to price activity a little differently it's just kind of like creating a weight system for different categories of activity and bubble will price it with a unit of measurement called the workload unit okay okay your monthly workload consumption is a sum of all workload units that you consumed throughout that month and to give you a little bit of perspective on the scale of what a workload unit is creating or modifying a database record costs half of a workload unit um deleting a database record is only a tenth of a workload unit okay there are other activities that are even smaller fractional amounts um there are other activities that are around this amount as well so over the course of a month month bubble is going to track all of your activity add up all of the workload units that you use and that's going to contribute to your monthly workload usage hey real quick if you're finding this helpful we've put together a complete guide that will help you figure out if bubble is right for your app you can check it out over at coaching nood apps.com buuble guide I've also put the link in the description below as you can see this guide walks you through everything from pricing to Performance IP ownership and more head to coaching nood apps.com buuble guide to get immediate access all right I'm going to come back to the workload units in just a moment so we can see how these contribute to your subscription plan but let's first understand what the different components are of the subscription package so the first is your base app plan this is bare minimum every single Bubble app needs to be tied to a plan and this is going to come with a fixed monthly uh cost that you'll pay just like any regular subscription and by the way I am I am going to be talking about this from the perspective of monthly pricing simply because bubble uh uh Aggregates your workload usage on a monthly basis but there are annual plans available too um and those will give you a little bit of a discount so let's take a look at the base app plan first each level of your base app plan will come with a certain amount of workload units that you can use okay and then it resets um in the next billing cycle so right now you have a free plan available to you that comes with 50,000 workload units um you have the first paid plan which is the starter plan that jumps up quite a bit to 175,000 workload units and you can see that it goes up from there now also important to note once you are on any one of the paid plans so starter and above um you will also get an additional 100,000 workload units for your development environment which is great to kind of give you some breathing room for test testing right cuz you will make mistakes you will need to run things more heavily than your users will in order to test it all out right you're going to be making changes you're going to make tweaks you need to run things over and over and over again and so having that Breathing Room of extra workload units in your development environment this is your like your sandbox not your live environment um is uh a way to kind of uh keep you within your limits but still have the freedom to you know build and test and make changes uh and not worry about exceeding your Usage Now the workload tier is an optional add-on plan that will give you extra workload units for your monthly cycle okay now this is something that you may not need it just depends on your particulars app uh case and and the type of usage that you're experiencing but these are a great way to add on more workload units without necessarily having to jump up in the higher base plans okay you see that there's multiple tiers here the highest tier gives you 20 million workload units so we're talking Enterprise level productions for that now you also have an optional overages feature that you can enable for your app as well you don't have to turn this on but it does act as a safety net if your app is one where there's less predictability maybe it has um the potential to go viral and you could see a huge spike in workload unit usage overages act as a pay as you go type of feature for any workload units you use that exceed your monthly allocated um amount okay so for example if you get 100,000 in a month and uh your the activity in your application uh spikes and before the month is over you're now at you know 110,000 for example bubble is going to kick you into the overages uh so the way that that's priced it's a certain amount for every additional thousand workload units that you've gone over now keep in mind if you do have an optional workload tier added uh to your plan that rate actually is lower the higher the tier the lower that rate is so it it's uh you know you get a bigger discount if you're on higher tiers now again you have the option to disable overages if you've got a tighter budget and you don't want to have um you know just a running Bill adding up throughout the month turning overages off will help you keep that uh monthly bill more contained but be very careful with this because if your app does exceed the monthly usage and you don't have overages enabled uh you risk your app being shut off uh now you can turn it back on if you enable overages or if you upgrade your plan if you add a workload toer right as long as you give yourself the workload units um your app can come back online and remember not every app needs to have overages enabled it really just depends on the environment that you've built out so these three components contribute to your total subscription plan package remember the only thing that's really required is your base plan um and depending on how you build it that may be all you need okay but if you have a more complicated application or more complex more intensive more unpredictable app you you may want to consider adding on additional tiers or uh enabling your overages now with several levels of app plans and workload tiers and then the option to enable overages it may be a little tricky to figure out what's going to be the best combination of that package for your app luckily bubble has created a calculator so that you can punch in the number of workload units you expect to have on a consistent monthly bases and it will calculate the best combination of those things for you so you understand uh and can expect what that monthly bill is going to look like we're actually going to take a look at this in a second I'm going to give you some perspective on this by looking at our own apps um so you can see some numbers and what those monthly numbers might look like if I wanted to upgrade um or or change anything about my package before we do that I do want to go over a few things to expect because of the variable nature of your workload consumption um there are some things that you are responsible for to keep your costs down um and some best practices that you want to follow so that you make things as predictable as possible Right remember that bubble apps are not all equal uh the nature of this platform is that you are given the freedom and flexibility to build all sorts of custom apps simple little tools to Enterprise level operation systems for companies right so with that freedom there is a lot of variability and uh bubble needs to be able to create a standardized system uh to price on all of that so it is up to you to build your app in the most efficient manner possible the first thing I want to go over is get some perspective if you're just getting started get some perspective on what kind of usage your app is going to require by getting started with the free or even the first paid plan the starter plan um if you need immediate access to some of those paid only features okay now here's a couple of a few rules of thumb the more predictable your app is the more predictable your monthly bill is going to be and apps that are more predictable tend to be ones where uh they might be more internal right so it's maybe for a team with a fixed number of users team members whatever it might be um and maybe the usage is um highly consistent right very normal uh it's going to be the same day in day out maybe even scheduled activi is happening there so you can very much predict about the usage your app will uh require in in in a given time frame less predictable applications U may have some variability in their usage so seasonal applications right maybe it's a tool that uh helps with bookings that happen during the summer for example so there's going to be a higher volume of traffic there um if you have controlled access but maybe still uh an unknown number of people that are coming in Day Day in day out um but still consistent usage right this is what I would consider sort of somewhat predictable uh and then the less predictable applications are the ones that have the potential to go viral they're more public facing they're Community powered the usage is really unknown On Any Given uh daily basis right so this is likely less of an internal tool and more of a public facing one now none of these options are bad you just have to understand what category your app falls into the less predictable it is the more Vigilant you're going to need to be around the efficiency of your application okay the more predictable it is uh the more stable that monthly uh bill is going to be for you now in order to uh stay on top of everything no matter what type of app You're Building you want to periodically evaluate your app's usage this is especially true if you expect it to grow over time right usage will change you'll have more traffic you'll have more logic um more complex logic potentially added into the app um more data for uh the application to work through as well so as you uh grow your application you want to do these periodic reviews to ensure that number one things are still uh working in an optimized way but number two you need to check if you need to grow into a higher plan to give yourself more breathing room with workload units before you get your limit okay so growth May mean upgrading to higher level plans and if you're an if your application is one where you're selling it right you have uh paid access your users are paying for access to the app then your business model should incorporate the cost of supporting this application as well you know if you are running a business on your application and you need to be on those higher plans definitely take these costs into account in your own Revenue model now to give you some perspective on what numbers look like with live applications I'm going to show you uh my metrics tab here that I have for two apps that that we have these are two live apps they're on the first paid plan um and I've got a month's worth of workload usage to show you now this tab here in the editor of this application uh this is our app metrics tab this is going to be your best friend there's um several charts here to help you understand what your usage is broken down by activity so you can understand where the heavier Parts um of activity are in your app um really help you identify you know opportunities for optimization if necessary so this first application is our membership application we have uh subscribers who come in on a daily basis uh to access our course content in our database of tutorial so they're performing searches through hundreds of lessons they are watching videos they're taking notes um and you know there's a lot of interactivity happening in the application uh like I said this is on the first paid plan which um right now let's go go back to our pricing page here is going to be 29 a month and it's going to come with 175,000 workload units okay so we are well under that we are um in the last month uh hitting 35,000 units we have so much room to have more activity in here if we had more users on a daily basis in the application if we had um more features that were more complicated U you know that they're interacting with if we had more API conect CS um uh running in the application we'd probably see higher uh usage uh with our workload units but this is an application that we've had running for years and you know it's one where we've really refined what we needed to do so there's really not a lot of change the up and down bars that we see here in the activity is just the users right on some days there will be more usage than others now you'll notice that there was a bigger Spike here these two days and that is precisely reflective of a of a of a change we we made to a particular feature it was a little bit more intensive than we thought and so we quickly made a correction and but that's exactly what this is for this is exactly why you know you want to be vigilant about these things and make it a habit to come here and evaluate uh your your Usage Now I do want to you know if I'm trying to make a decision on what plan to be I do want to take the entire month into account because then I can get a better picture of what's going to be more average um I don't necessarily want to look at one specific day at a time because that wouldn't really give me the best big picture now I'm going to switch over to another application uh that serves a different purpose so remember this one here are like course course application 35,000 units for the month our next one it's a higher uh higher usage uh so you can see the perspective of the chart has changed a little bit the upper limit is now 14,000 over here whereas the previous one was 4,500 so just be mindful there's you know it it uh the scale changes um and so in the month we're using 100 we'll we'll Round Up 160,000 uh workload units we're still on the first paid plan so that first paid plans uh 175 allocated units covers Us very easily um this is also a consistent um you know usage here you notice that you can see throughout the week we have kind of consistent usage there's more activity during one part of the week and then it kind of goes down and then it comes back up uh we do have kind of scheduled things that go out so that would that's to be expect Ed um this application is actually our main website uh so we do have a lot of other things going on um in this application you know we have scheduling tools on here we have an internal tracking system that we have on here um we have our Workshop which is an hourlong you know webinar uh that users can watch and um there's actually a 5c workflow it happens every 5 Seconds which is honestly the thing that's probably contributing to a lot of the workload usage in our app overall um in fact if I scroll down here and drill into my levels of activity I'm going to click into the workload here you can see this which is taking up the majority of uh the chart here you can see right there it's 112,000 workload units this is for the month it's because we've got something going on every 5 Seconds that's necessary for us because it allows us to do a particular type of track tracking um on an interaction so you know it's worth it for us to have a more expens expensive uh feature going on there and and I want to be clear about that too just because something is more expensive or has to be more complex uh you know to make something work doesn't mean that it's bad you've just got to prioritize other things to allow that more expensive thing to run properly you just got to optimize other areas so that the entire app isn't you know uh really spiking your usage um it's a matter of balancing it all okay so these metrics here really help me understand on a on a consistent basis how the app is performing if I see activity that starts to look unusual it can help me pinpoint where to go and make that correction I can continue to drill down further in this pie chart eventually it'll take me to the actual spot in my app uh where you know there might be a condition that is not built out properly or a search that could probably be streamlined something like that now let's head over to bubble's subscription planner calculator so you can also get some perspective on these numbers as they relate to your plan cost all right so let's take a look here the first thing we're going to do is Select our billing cycle I'm going to go with monthly so we can see the higher numbers um but you know there are annual plans that give you a little bit of a discount then you're going to want to check uh you're want to select your plan type now I'm going to start with the starter plan because that that way we can see what our lowest possible amount would be per month given a certain amount of workload units expected um but keep in mind that you may need to start on a higher plan simply to get access to other paid features that um are restricted to the higher levels um the the different plans are not just about the workload units you know higher plans will actually give you more collaboration features so you can have more development environments to work with a team um you can go further back in time to restore your application to restore your database if you need so there are a few things that are restricted to the higher level plan so depending on your needs you may actually need to start on a higher um base plan we're going to start with the starter here and uh remember my uh higher usage plan we're going to round it to 160 ,000 workload units so just to see what that gives us it should just give us the starter plan um because uh we're looking at 160 and the starter plan gives us 175 and yes there we are so it's just the starter plan no expected overages no additional workload tier um if I knew that I needed to start on the growth plan simply for feature access then that's what I'm paying for now I I do get many more workload units than I really need but uh you know keep all of this in mind of like what your ual requirements are let's go back to the starter plan let's put in let's say double and we're going to just round it for even numbers sake we'll say 300,000 not quite double but uh notice that 300,000 is a little bit over the growth plan but if I specifically want to be on the starter plan um then what I need on top of that to account for the 300,000 is the first workload tier so this is actually great because in total I'm only paying 61 a month to get the uh this would be 375 right it will comfortably cover my 300,000 and which is much lower than if I had jumped up completely to the next plan just to get extra workload units I mean it wouldn't have even covered me all the way um but you see that there's a big significant difference there with these like in between workload tiers that you can add on and that's why this tool is helpful is just to help you find the best combination of these plans um let's go to let's do a million a million workload units so um this way we can see a little bit of everything for for you know an entire package here so we're looking at 14150 a month um if we want to be on the starter plan and uh have an additional tier this is tier two now with some expected overages to cover that million a month um notice again tier three this team is 500,000 uh workload units so if I needed to be on the team plan let's switch over there okay so we're looking at 473 so again 500,000 doesn't cover my million but I don't need as high have an additional tier to cover the rest but I should also expect overages um to to cover everything here which is the the best combination versus combining this with a higher tier that also covers it because it could you know it would be a higher cost compared to just going into overages right so definitely take advantage of this tool first decide on um what level of plan you need for features just in general the starter plan is great for most apps that are just getting started um and then after you kind of get some perspective as you test and get started building in a in the free plan um you can do some measurements um in the app metrics tab to start to estimate how how many workload units you need a month so that you can better predict what your future uh you know bills are going to look like over time this is something you can also come back to uh you know as your app starts to grow now we've worked with literally hundreds of applications in many different Industries we've kind of seen it all everything from small internal tools to full-blown sass systems and these are some of the common culprits for high workload usage so I want to help you keep an eye out for them the first is recursive workflows these are looping workflows and you are in complete control of the logic for that Loop how frequently it runs what happens in the workflow itself if you're not careful with your logic here it's very easy to end up with you know hundreds if not thousands of Records in your database in a matter of seconds or minutes we've seen it happen many times so uh recursive workflows are something you want to be very very careful with um because it can lead to a huge Spike very quickly um overly complex database searching you know if you're finding that you're having to create all sorts of complicated filters or constraints on your searches it's probably speaking to um an inefficient data based structure right so how you configure your data types your Fields your option sets the relationships between everything a lot really comes down to the architecture of your database that also leads me to my next point right inefficient database modification if you have overly complex ways of changing your records in your app or creating records or having to set up links um in in a clunky way it probably says something about uh your architecture not being right there are many ways to accomplish the same thing but you know not every approach is necessarily going to be the most efficient so if you're finding that things are getting too clunky or you're having to go through too many Pathways just to get to a specific data point um revisit your structure see if there's a different way to approach relationships or organizing that data Um this can also lead to redundancy uh with fetching data you know there's lots of ways to retrieve data in your designs and display it back to your user or just use them in your logic in general um you you don't want to be redundant you want to consolidate and streamline as much as possible um one of the rules of thumb here with you know efficient workload usage is only fetching data when you need it right don't just have it happening in the background just because only fetch data when you need it because there are you know there's a cost to that uh so you want to be as efficient as possible same thing goes for your workflow logic um you know you have the ability to stop things from running if you don't need them to run so something we see come up all the time is unnecessary calls to apis uh with you know those third party Integrations uh just because you have the connection doesn't necessarily mean that the user always needs to access it so so make sure that you know every single flow is very intentional and you're not just doing things just because um you know get away from this concept of well I'm just going to keep it in the background just in case and what I mean by that is you know pulling data to have and and if the user is not going to ever need it then you've just wasted your workload units um similar to this as well is uh you know wait for web hooks this is a a way for applications to communicate with each other so let's say you have a connection with a stripe payment Gateway uh and you you want your app to be notified when a new subscription was created for example or a new payment has gone through or a credit card has failed wait for stripe to tell you that that has happened right that's a web hook notification it's an appto app message um rather than you constantly checking right you don't want to check for things every 10 seconds every hour um because that could lead to a lot of unnecessary workload usage so obviously there are a handful of variables and like I said every app is different so here are the things that you want to keep in mind to really stay in control of your app and of your app's costs number one test early and test often this is true no matter what doesn't matter what platform you're building on doesn't matter what type of app You're Building doesn't matter what the pricing system is you've got to test you've got to get in the habit of testing and become a master at it and do it frequently this is going to give you more opportunity to catch things soon right you it it ensures that you don't end up creating extra work for yourself later down the line it also helps you find the mistakes before your users do test early test often that will help you identify any weak points or opportunities for optimization as soon as possible select a plan combination that is going to give you some breathing room so even if you can predict your monthly usage pretty well give yourself some space um on that upper limit of workload units allowed in a month you never never know you may introduce a feature that is going to be more expensive than a normal and so you don't want to be so close to your limit for the month that you end up exceeding it uh you know because of one new thing that you've added to your app make sure you give yourself plenty of room and you know be vigilant about it those are things that you can always adjust you can go up and down in the tiers if you'd like uh the overages are also something to to keep in mind and with that said you know make a decision on whether or not you want to enable overages for some folks this may just be like a budgeting decision right um if you need to have a much more fixed cost than your uh base plan and your workload tier plan are going to give you that exact fixed cost uh the overages is really more of a safety net if you ever anticipate you know unexpected spikes um then that can ensure that your app is not taken offline make performance reviews a part of your development routine you know i' I've said this a few times already that you need to be Vigilant about everything but this really has to be a normal thing for you it has to be part of what it means to create and manage maintain an application not just for the first version but long term this is true for anything that you build you've got to do routine maintenance otherwise it can start to break down on you and you may not even notice so if you're doing these regular reviews you'll very much be on top of it um calculate your expected usage with aggregate data so don't just look at one day right because one day may not be a great representative of a month's worth of workload units if you have the data for a bigger span of Time start to go off of that obviously when you just get started you're not going to have a lot of time built up but um during you you know your periodic reviews as your app continues to evolve look at your aggregate data and understand what is the general average uh you know what's the upper limit that you hit what's the lower limit um and and how help that make a decision for you in terms of what plans you want to be on and aim for predictability of course if you understand um on a regular basis what your usage is going to look like you're going to have a more predictable monthly bill okay so a lot of this comes down to uh the way that your logic has been put together in your app uh you want to create everything with intention everything should have a reason for why it works in a certain way um anytime something is executed in the app it was because of something that was necessary not just because um so conditions can really help you with that sort of thing if you can schedule things that also helps you control the environment uh right because they're more consistent that way if things are scheduled again not every app necessarily has the luxury of being so predictable but aim for it as much as possible in everything that you do all right I hope this was helpful in guiding you through next steps with your own no code app and if it was check out the content you're about to see on the next screen to take it even further

Channel: Coaching No Code Apps

Views: 5,097

Keywords: bubble.io, no code, bubble for beginners, pricing, workload, workload units, wu, subscription planner, usage, variable pricing, dynamic pricing, pay as you go, overages, workload tier, app plan, bubble plan, how much does bubble cost, bubble subscription, bubble costs, pricing plan, bubble.io pricing, bubble.io costs, bubble.io pricing plan, bubble pricing 2024, bubble pricing changes, bubble pricing plan, bubble.io pricing model, bubble app cost, bubble io price, price change

Id: 12Xl603LUDA

Length: 29min 55sec (1795 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 07 2024