Bubble.io's New Pricing - Workload Units Explained with Live App Example

Analyzing Bubble.io's New Pricing with a Live App Example

We didn't want to rush out a new video about the Bubble pricing announcement on April 6th. So we've waited until the new week and we think that one of the best ways of looking into workload units is to use an example of a side project I've been working on. Let's dive into it.

Demonstrating the App Functionality

This is a side project. It's basically just something that I wanted to build to experiment with OpenAI when we first got GPT 3.5 out about a few weeks ago. Here's how it works: I can search for a book. So I search for Harry Potter and I can click on the book title. Now it's making a request to OpenAI for OpenAI to recommend three books that I would like because they are similar to Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.

Analyzing Workload Units

Once I've demonstrated the app, I'm going to display to you each of the steps that is taken in the workflow. And then we'll look at the workload units that are used. If I dive into the Bubble app and just go back to normal Zoom, we can see here, this is today. The workload usage metrics here are taking a little bit of time to update. I really hope that they fix that because otherwise how on earth are we going to know how much a particular feature or sub feature in that app takes?

Breaking Down the Workflow

This is what happens when a user clicks on a book. I make the API call to OpenAI. I supply the title and the author. I then have a method here called user stats. This has enabled me to track when the same user uses the app more than once. I then set the slug for the results page where I display my three books. I then create a new book. I've approached this as using split by to effectively parse the data into my first book recommended, my second book, and my third book. I then save those books back into what I've called save search, which is a data type in Bubble.

Additional Workflow Steps

I send an event notification to LogSnag. I'm going to have a video coming out about LogSnag soon. It's a very simple way of tracking user events in your app. And then I send the user to the book recommendation page. All of that takes 204 workload units.

Calculating Usage on Different Plans

If I have the starter plan, then I'm entitled to 175,000 workload units. By doing a little bit of very simple formula work in this Google sheet, that's how many workflows that, basically how many times a user can try and discover a new book using my service a month, leaving me with 28. And remember, there will be additional ways that workload units will be accumulated, such as if a user refreshes the page, such as if they were to try and initiate the OpenAI call, but something was to fail, it's all going to add up.

Limitations on the Free Plan

Now where this gets interesting is, in the course of building this app, before we knew about workload units, I would have been testing it. And I had to test this so much in order to be able to pass the data for individual books, to get that formatting from OpenAI to enable me to take like a plain text expression from OpenAI and turn that into three separate books. If I was on the free plan when I was testing it, I'm taking this right the way down to 25,000. And then, yes, I'm not going to work on this every single day of the month, all 30 days or so, but I'm left with this what feels like a pitifully small number of basically being able to run, testing my very simple app that uses OpenAI, limited to four times a day.

Concerns About the New Pricing Model

I think this just begins to highlight what I think is a reflective and genuine response from the Bubble app developer community that once the initial shock and the anger and maybe the fear for people's livelihoods has gone. We're left with some plans and some measurements of capacity, the workload unit, which simply does not work. It's just simply so limiting, or it's going to cause people's monthly fees to just explode and become huge numbers.

Hopes for Improvement

I really hope that Bubble sorts this out. As the time of recording this is April 10th, so a few days have passed since the announcement. The forum posts around have blown up. There does seem to be some obviously very angry people, but also people who are just concerned about their livelihoods. And I flip-flopped from being optimistic to pessimistic and back and forth about these new pricing announcements.

Conclusion and Call to Action

I think ultimately they're out of my hands and I have to try and extend the goodwill to the Bubble team that they've accumulated over the years. It sounds a little bit cheesy, but to trust that they really are what they say they're doing, which is they've read through these forum posts. There are hundreds and hundreds of comments based on pricing, all the discussion that's taken place. And I'm trying to be optimistic about an announcement, which they've said will come later in this week, about ensuring that users are not priced out or building the apps that they are already running or are already developing. Leave a comment below if you have any video suggestions for us, we read every single one. If you want any Bubble one-to-one coaching, you can do that through our website, planetnocode.com.