Your inputs
Directional · not an invoiceBubble tier thresholds estimated from public pricing pages · ranges vary by app type, plugin mix, recursive-workflow exposure.
WU cost calculator
What does next year on Bubble actually cost?
Plug your current monthly bill + growth rate. We project the next 12 months, the tier jump that’s probably coming, and the same app on a code rebuild for comparison.
In 12 months · still on Bubble
$14k
Production+ → Production+ · $2.3k in overages
Same app on code · 12 months
$3.0k
Vercel + Supabase mid-traffic · scales linearly · no tier jumps
You keep · year 1
$11k
Before counting engineering hours reclaimed (5× faster shipping), hiring premium dropped, and the diligence wins that don’t show up in this projection.
Workload-unit FAQ
What founders ask once the calculator stops them cold.
The questions that come up the moment the 12-month projection turns the corner. Plain English, with the actual Bubble pricing mechanics behind each answer.
- What is a Bubble Workload Unit (WU)?
- A Workload Unit is Bubble.io's unit of compute consumption — every page view, workflow run, database query, scheduled task, and API call burns WUs. Each Bubble plan ships with a monthly WU allowance; once you exceed it, you pay an overage rate per 1,000 WUs ($0.30 by default, lower with a workload-tier add-on). WU consumption scales with traffic, data-set size, and workflow density, so the same app costs different amounts month to month.
- How does Bubble's workload-unit pricing actually work?
- Bubble's plans (Starter, Growth, Team) each include a monthly WU bucket. When you exceed it, you can either move to the next tier or pay overage at $0.30 per 1,000 WUs (or as low as $0.008 per 1,000 with a committed workload-tier subscription). The pricing tail is steep: at scale, a single tier jump can add hundreds of dollars per month. The published per-plan numbers are in Bubble's pricing FAQ; the overage tail is what most calculators miss.
- What triggers a Bubble tier jump?
- Three common drivers: traffic growth (each page view consumes WUs), data growth (sorted searches over more than 50,000 records start hitting the platform's sorted-search cap), and workflow density (recurring workflows, scheduled API workflows, complex backend conditions). A spike in any one of these can push you over your plan's WU allowance for the month and force the overage charge or the next-tier upgrade.
- How does Bubble's cost compare to running the same app on code?
- Self-hosted on Vercel + Supabase, a typical mid-size Bubble app costs $40–$200 per month for hosting + database + auth + storage combined. The same app on Bubble's Growth or Team tier with WU overage often runs $200–$1,500 per month, scaling with traffic. The calculator above plots both lines so you can see the cross-over point — usually 4–14 months of Bubble usage equals the cost of a one-time code rebuild.
- Why do my Bubble bills keep going up month over month?
- Two reasons. First, your app's data and traffic naturally grow, so WU consumption rises with it. Second, Bubble's pricing has shifted from flat plans to workload-billed plans in stages over 2023–2025, so existing apps grandfather into less favourable rates as they upgrade. The cost curve is monotonically upward for any growing Bubble app, which is the structural problem the rebuild solves.