Simple
$8-15k
3-5 weeks
Internal tool or focused product · 1-2 spine workflows
For board members + lead VCs
“They’re on Bubble.” What that actually means for the term sheet.
You’re looking at a Bubble-built portfolio company and the tech-stack section is making you wince. This page is the diligence checklist — what to verify, what to discount, what to budget for, and how the rebuild economics actually work in 2026 (spoiler: not the 6-month / 6-figure number from 2023).
The diligence checklist
Six questions that should be on every Bubble-stack diligence call.
Most of these can be answered with a 30-second screen share. None of them should slide through to closing without an explicit yes/no.
Q 01
Does the founder own the code?
Bubble's runtime + editor are not exportable. The product can't be moved off the platform without a rebuild. Apps under acquisition typically have a discount applied for this.
Red flag if:
The founder says 'we own our data' (you can export data; you can't export the runtime).
Q 02
What's the workload-unit bill — and what's the trajectory?
WU is Bubble's consumption metric. Recursive workflows can 10x the bill overnight. There's no hard cap or kill-switch; alerts trigger 23 hours after the spike.
Red flag if:
Founder can't show a 12-month WU trend. Most growth-stage Bubble apps see step-jumps every 1-2 quarters.
Q 03
Does the app's SOC 2 actually cover the app?
Bubble itself has SOC 2 Type II. That does NOT automatically apply to the app built on Bubble. Enterprise customers and B2B contracts will discover this during their own diligence.
Red flag if:
Founder says 'we're on Bubble, they're SOC 2 compliant' as if that closes the question.
Q 04
What happens when the lead Bubble dev quits?
Bubble specialist pool is ~10% the size of the Next.js pool. Replacement time on a senior Bubble engineer is 3-9 months in our experience.
Red flag if:
Single-engineer team where that one engineer is the only person who can ship anything. Look at the org chart.
Q 05
How dependent are they on third-party plugins?
Plugins routinely break on update with no rollback. Most plugins depend on the unpkg CDN, which Bubble themselves flagged as a single point of failure in their March 2025 stability update.
Red flag if:
Plugin count > 8, or the app loads JS from unpkg directly. Both are runtime-fragility flags.
Q 06
What's the migration timeline + cost if it has to happen?
The 2023 6-month / 6-figure rebuild number is outdated. With AI-assisted development, mid-complexity migrations now ship in 6-9 weeks at $18-35k. This should be a footnote in the deal memo, not a deal-killer.
Red flag if:
Quotes from 2023 still being used. Asking the founder is also valid; if they don't have a number, they haven't planned for it.
The economics, in 2026
The 6-figure rebuild was a 2023 number.
AI-assisted development re-set the cost curve. Real migration ranges below from our last 12 production rebuilds.
Medium
$18-32k
6-9 weeks
B2B SaaS · 5-10 spine workflows · Stripe + Clerk · most apps land here
Complex
$40-75k
10-14 weeks
Marketplace · enterprise-style permissions · multi-tenant
For comparison: Goodspeed Studio (Bubble Agency of the Year 2024 + 2025) publicly states $18-35k for mid-complexity migration in 2025-2026. The last $80k+ quotes you may have seen are agencies that haven’t adopted AI tooling.
The middle path for portfolio companies
Hybrid: customer-facing on code, admin tools stay on Bubble.
For founders who can’t afford a full pause to rebuild, hybrid is the default. Hot paths (signup, billing, public pages, spine workflows) move to code where diligence and customer-facing perf matter. Cold paths (admin dashboards, internal CRM, low-traffic ops) stay on Bubble. Half the cost, half the cutover risk, all the diligence wins.
Recommended for any portfolio company where the migration is on the critical path to your next round but the team can’t fully pause for it.
Want us on the diligence call?
Happy to join under NDA, screen-share through the company’s Bubble export, and answer the migration math live. We do this for free.