For founders

Bubble got you to product-market fit. Code gets you past it.

You shipped fast and validated the idea — that was the right call. This page is for the moment after: when performance, hiring, per-seat cost, or a due-diligence question makes the platform the thing holding you back. No platform-bashing, no rebuild-for-rebuild’s-sake.

Start with a migration estimate, see fixed-price packages, or weigh the trade-offs in Bubble vs custom code.

When Bubble starts holding you back

Bubble was right for 18 months. Here’s where it stops.

We’re not platform-bashing. Bubble shipped your MVP. But once your app has paying customers, an engineer or two, and an investor conversation in the calendar — eight specific things start to break in the same order, in every Bubble app we see. These are them, in their owners’ own words.

workload units in 24h

One forum post · $1k surprise bill · no hard cap, no kill-switch

5.8s

P50 page load

After heavy optimization · target was sub-2s

of your code is yours

Can't export, can't fork, can't audit, can't sell separately

April 2023 · the moment the relationship visibly broke

Bubble announced a pricing-model change so badly received that co-founder Emmanuel Straschnov publicly disclosed receiving “physical — or death — threats” on Twitter. The community thread reached 2,000+ replies in days. Bubble eventually walked back specific WU costs by 50-99% — but trust at the power-user layer never fully recovered.

Source: @estraschnov on X (April 13, 2023) · Bubble’s walk-back thread

Workload-unit spikes you don't see coming

One bad recursive workflow burns through your monthly budget in a single night. No hard cap, no kill-switch, no alert until 23 hours after the spike.

“$1k is about 7x my normal bill”
— mitchbaylis · Bubble Forum

7M WU

in 24h · $1k overage

Page loads stretch past 5 seconds

Every workflow, every long list, every nested repeating group eats your capacity units. Optimization plateaus by the time you actually need it.

“P50 and P99 page load duration are ~5.8 seconds. I've already heavily optimized.”
— Bubble Forum

5.8s

P50 + P99 page load

Outages during the worst possible moment

Bubble's own status page shows instability almost every day in 2024-2025. Editor crashes mid-feature, frontend goes down mid-demo, paying customers see error screens.

“Can't load the editor to fix something ahead of an important demo this morning. Major system outage.”
— Bubble Forum

every day

platform instability 2025

Plugins break your live app silently

Plugin updates ship without notice. The unpkg CDN they depend on goes down. You can't roll back. Bubble themselves admit it in their March 2025 stability update.

“My live version it's fully bugged cuz of plugin update… but can't roll back.”
— Bubble Forum

no rollback

plugin updates are silent

You can't hire your way out

Bubble specialists charge a 40-60% premium over Next.js engineers and the pool is a tenth the size. Try backfilling a senior Bubble dev before your funding round.

“Engineers do not want to work in Bubble.”
— Brilworks teardown

0.1×

talent pool vs JS

Investor diligence raises flags

Series A diligence asks for code ownership, infra portability, SOC 2 evidence at YOUR app level (not just Bubble's). 'It's on Bubble' becomes a re-tooling conversation before the wire.

“When bigger customers ask about data security, SOC 2 compliance, or where their data lives, Bubble's shared infrastructure becomes a liability.”
— AlterSquare

3 of 5

Series A funds flag Bubble

Custom features fight the 300s timeout

Workflows over 5 minutes time out. Recursive logic gets throttled. Modern AI / real-time / long-running anything requires plugin-land or JavaScript-on-page hacks.

“Need to use a reasoning model for one of my workflows, but this will take 1-2 minutes. Bubble's backend workflows time out…”
— Bubble Forum

300s cap

hard backend workflow limit

You're renting your business

Bubble owns the runtime, the editor, the pricing, and the roadmap. One platform decision — a tier change, a feature deprecation, an acquisition — and your app changes with it.

“Bubble STILL does not allow source code export, which is inexcusable today.”
— Trustpilot review

code portability

50,000

records

Sorted search starts breaking above this size · Brilworks teardown

300s

hard workflow timeout

Bubble docs · any reasoning model / long-running task gets killed

$10K

monthly ops · wake-up call

AlterSquare's threshold to seriously consider migration

Quotes pulled verbatim from public Bubble Forum threads, Trustpilot reviews, and our last 12 production migrations. Even Petter Amlie’s official Bubble performance guide can only optimise a real app down to ~3s page load. Your app may dodge some of these — the free migration analysis tells you which ones bite hardest in your specific case.

What you walk away with

What the free migration analysis gives you.

Book a call or send your details, and we come back with a plain-English report, a working preview of your app rebuilt, and a chat to ask anything.

1 · the main thing

A clear report on your whole app

In plain English: what’s risky, what’s worth keeping, and a step-by-step plan to rebuild it. Every point is based on your real app — not generic advice.

Your step-by-step rebuild plan

First

Sign-in & payments

Then

Your main features

Last

Polish & move over

read onlineshare a linksave as PDF

2 · see it for real

A working preview you can click

We rebuild your app as real software and put it online at a link you can open and try — so you can see it working, not just picture it.

a private link, just for youlive

3 · easy to share

Slides to share with your team

A short slide deck that walks through the plan — ready to forward to a co-founder, your team, or investors.

Your rebuild plan

4 · ask anything

Ask questions, get real answers

Which parts are risky to rebuild?

Your payments first — right now a failed charge can bill a customer twice. We’d fix that before anything else.

5 · matches your brand

Your exact look, captured

Your colors, fonts, and spacing — pulled out automatically so the rebuild looks like your app, not a template.

6 · yours to keep

The starting code for your app

The foundation of your new app, already set up — yours to keep, even if you decide to build the rest yourself.

The pages people see
Sign-in & accounts
Payments
Where your data lives
…and the rest, wired up

7 · no surprises

Three honest timelines

A careful, a likely, and a best-case estimate — so you see the full range up front instead of one number.

Careful11 weeks
Likely8 weeks
Best case6 weeks

8 · ready from day one

Set up so nothing starts from scratch

Your brand colors and settings come already built into the new app, so whoever picks it up isn’t starting from a blank page.

your palette, already in

Receipts

Three recent rebuilds. Anonymised, real numbers.

Clients prefer not to be publicly named — Bubble is a partner ecosystem and we respect that. The numbers below are exactly what we shipped.

Marketplace

B2C marketplace with Stripe Connect

Bubble workflows: 182
Code rebuild time: 11 weeks
Monthly infra: $340 → $42

See yours

Internal CRM

Sales-ops platform for a 25-person team

Original Bubble bill: $1,180/mo
Code rebuild time: 7 weeks
Now self-hosted: $60/mo

See yours

Vertical SaaS

Inventory + invoicing for a niche industry

Bubble app age: 3 years
Code rebuild time: 9 weeks
Page-load p95: 8s → 0.6s

See yours

When you become a customer, we’ll ask for permission to add yours here too — with whatever attribution you’re comfortable with. NDA- friendly versions like the ones above are the default.

See what your rebuild would look like.

Get an instant migration estimate — timeline and the package that fits — or book a call and we’ll walk your app together. You decide what happens next.

Book a call Get an instant estimate