How to create recurring workflows in Bubble in 2023

Understanding Recurring Workflows in Bubble

In this Bubble tutorial video, I'm going to demonstrate how to create recurring workflows the right way. Now we have covered recurring workflows before in this channel and that was before May 2023 when we had to deploy some sort of workaround and that was mainly to do with this. If I'm going on to the Bubble pricing table and look at recurring workflows before May 2023, if you're on the what is now known as the starter plan but basically the first few plans, you were limited to how frequently you could run the workflow. So in fact on the first paid plan, you could only run the workflow every month and so we developed a workaround using chrome jobs but this has changed since the new pricing came in in May 2023.

New Pricing and Features in Bubble

Yeah because of Bubble's new pricing, they have also added in features to help optimize your apps including making recurring workflows available on a daily rate on all of the paid plans. So here is how you add them into your app. I'm going to do this really simply. I've got a page and I just want to be able to email a user every day for example.

Creating a Recurring Workflow

So I go into backend workflows and I create a new recurring event and I'm going to just call this email user. I'm going to put the type as user and then I'm going to add in the email action. I'm going to say current workflows users email and I'll just subject daily email hi this is a recurring email in Bubble. Okay right so I have that as a backend workflow as a recurring event but recurring events have to be triggered.

Triggering the Recurring Workflow

So I'm going to go back to my page that I've called recurring workflows and I'm going to just add in a button. Now you would need to work out the appropriate place to trigger this in your app. If your app does send a daily email maybe you would incorporate the action that I'm adding to this button into your registration workflow. I'm just going to say start recurring emails and then right then I find set or cancel a recurring event. I pick my recurring event that I created in the backend workflows tab workflow thing. Remember I'm passing a user into it because I'm using the user's email as my recipient data and then the frequency I'm going to say daily and start date. So just so I can demonstrate how this works I'm going to do current date plus 20 seconds.

Demonstrating the Workflow Scheduling

Okay so the end of our preview and so that I can show how this works I'm going into logs scheduler and then I'm wanting to show workflows scheduled after the current time. Here's the time that I'm recording this video. So if I click the button and then click show it's now showing me that a scheduled workflow this is how the repeating events work a scheduler workflow is scheduled for looking at the time or maybe I put the wrong time in there. Let's just check I did oh add add seconds 20. Okay so what I wanted to demonstrate is that this is July the 5th which is today and it's scheduled for two minutes time for some reason even though I said 20 seconds.

Understanding Recurring Events in Bubble

Again so the workflow has run and we can see that it's no longer saying July 5th which is the day I'm recording this video it's now saying July 6th. So effectively a recurring event a recurring workflow is just scheduling workflows to happen in the future and they're all not accessible through a scheduler just as if you had scheduled any other API workflow it is available from the scheduler.

Conclusion and Additional Resources

So if you need any help with your Bubble app you can reach out to us through our website we offer Bubble one-to-one coaching we also have even more videos on our website many of them are member exclusives you can become a member to gain access to them to help you out with developing your Bubble app.