Thousands of “no code” builders may shut down their businesses before the end of 2024. 😬

Why?

A combination of vendor lock-in and lack of high-level understanding of business profitability and viability.

Bubble just announced new pricing plans on Thursday. 💸

Hundreds of “no code” developers flagged usage peaks resulting in over 10 times higher system costs due to the recent change. 📈

This impacts Bubble folks in different segments:

1. SaaS developers seeing wild spikes of infrastructure, unable to maintain license/subscription fees
2. Service contractors failing to close new business due to maintenance costs for Bubble
3. Course creators, bloggers, content producers – as the ecosystem shifts to alternative tools

Now – this isn’t something you would EVER face with open-source software like WordPress. 🦸

I highly doubt that would happen with Shopify, either. It’s a profitable SaaS with a mature ecosystem scaling with stores (transaction fees grow with the GMV). 🛒

But Bubble’s initial costs make no business sense long-term.

I’ve held that conversation with other entrepreneurs and founders in the ecosystem.

It’s lucrative. 🫣 We can’t offer comparable costs (at all). It’s not sustainable for mere mortals.

It’s tempting to use them… Until a sudden turn of events (like this pricing bump this week.)

Imagine basing an actual business or raising funds on top of Bubble and your annual costs growing 10X starting next year! 🥲

Looking into other systems and software, the problem is either clear or balanced out:

✅ Webflow’s starter pricing is lucrative but it’s easy to hit limits and keep scaling exponentially. It’s a known industry fact (lots of reviews and feedback online, too)
✅ Cloudflare is struggling with free plans. It’s a GREAT software positioned perfectly but losing a fortune on free. Gradually updating UX and making efforts to bring more toward paid plans.
✅ Akismet (by Automattic) started as free, then introduced more prominent paid plans, pushed free to the bottom, moved to “name your price”, and even explicitly labeled the “free” option as non-commercial to limit any free use as much as possible

Bottom line – freemium isn’t a new concept, and neither is low-cost pricing to keep growing the user base.

“Free” as in free usage exists in social media as well – alas, through both ads and additional use of aggregated personal data offloaded (shared/sold) to third parties.

🧑‍🏫 So – while I’m all about innovation – and love what Bubble brought to the techverse – it’s so hard basing a career or a business venture on a growing startup with negative user ROI (even after raising a $100M round in 2021).

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