Bubble Limitations That Catch Business Owners Off Guard

Bubble.io is the most capable no-code app builder on the market. That’s not flattery — it’s genuinely impressive. You can build a multi-page web application with user authentication, a database, workflows, API connections, and a responsive front end, all without writing a line of code. For prototyping an idea or building a minimum viable product, it’s hard to argue against it.

But there’s a gap between “I built an MVP” and “I’m running a production business application,” and Bubble sits squarely in the first camp. The platform was designed to help people build things quickly, not to run them at scale. When you try to cross that gap — when the prototype becomes the product — the limitations start showing up in ways that are expensive to fix.

Performance Gets Painful

Bubble apps run on Bubble’s servers. You don’t get to choose your infrastructure, optimise your database queries, or tune your server configuration. You get what Bubble gives you, and what Bubble gives you is shared infrastructure that degrades under load.

Real-world performance issues:

• Page load times of 3-8 seconds are common for Bubble apps with moderate complexity. For comparison, users expect web pages to load in under 2 seconds, and Google penalises sites that take longer than 2.5 seconds in search rankings.
• Database queries slow down as your data grows. Bubble’s visual query builder doesn’t let you add indexes, optimise joins, or write efficient queries. You’re at the mercy of however Bubble has configured its backend.
• Concurrent users cause bottlenecks. A Bubble app that runs smoothly for 10 simultaneous users might crawl with 100. There’s no way to scale horizontally or add server capacity on demand.
• Workflows queue up during peak usage. If 50 users trigger a workflow at the same time, they run sequentially, not in parallel. Users experience delays while they wait in an invisible queue.

Bubble offers a “Dedicated” plan for better performance, but it starts at US$349/month and still runs on Bubble’s infrastructure with Bubble’s constraints. You’re paying premium prices for marginal improvements.

Vendor Lock-In Is Total

This is the single biggest risk with Bubble, and it’s the one most people underestimate.

When you build on Bubble, everything you create lives inside Bubble’s ecosystem. The visual workflows, the database structure, the page designs, the API connections — none of it is exportable. There is no “export my app” button. There is no way to download your application logic and run it somewhere else.

If you decide to leave Bubble — or if Bubble decides to change their pricing, deprecate a feature, or shut down — you don’t migrate your app. You rebuild it from scratch.

Let that sink in. A business that spent 12 months and $50,000 building a Bubble application has created an asset that is worth precisely zero outside of Bubble’s platform. The knowledge of what the app should do is valuable. The actual implementation is not transferable.

You can export your data as CSV files. That’s it. Your workflows, your user interface, your business logic, your API integrations — those stay behind.

The Database Is a Black Box

Bubble gives you a visual database that feels intuitive — create a data type, add fields, link records. But under the hood, it’s a proprietary database with significant constraints:

• No SQL access — you can’t write queries. You use Bubble’s visual search builder, which limits you to the operations Bubble has implemented.
• No bulk operations — need to update 10,000 records based on a condition? You’ll need to write a recursive backend workflow that processes them one by one, which can take hours.
• No database-level constraints — there’s no way to enforce uniqueness, foreign key integrity, or check constraints at the database level. Data validation happens in the UI layer, which means it can be bypassed.
• Limited aggregation — counting, summing, and averaging work. Anything beyond that — group by, having, subqueries, window functions — isn’t available.
• No backups you control — Bubble takes backups, but you can’t schedule your own, download them, or restore to a specific point in time on lower plans. If something goes wrong with your data, you submit a support ticket and hope.

For an MVP with 500 records and a handful of users, none of this matters. For a production app processing thousands of records daily with data integrity requirements, it’s a serious liability.

Scalability Has a Hard Ceiling

Bubble’s architecture imposes limits that don’t exist in custom software:

• Workflow execution limits — backend workflows have a queue that processes sequentially. High-volume operations (processing an order, sending notifications to multiple users, running batch calculations) queue up and slow down as volume increases.
• API rate limits — Bubble’s API connector has rate limits that you can’t increase. If your app integrates with external services that require high-frequency API calls, you’ll hit walls.
• File storage constraints — Bubble stores files on their servers with limits that increase with plan level, but there’s no CDN configuration or storage optimisation available to you.
• No background processing — there’s no equivalent of a job queue, a cron scheduler you control, or a background worker process. Everything runs through Bubble’s workflow system.

These limits are invisible at small scale. A business processing 20 orders per day won’t notice. A business processing 200 orders per day will notice every one of them.

Pricing That Punishes Growth

Bubble’s pricing tiers create an awkward cost curve:

• Free — extremely limited, essentially for learning
• Starter — US$32/month, basic functionality
• Growth — US$134/month, most features unlocked
• Team — US$269/month, collaboration features
• Dedicated — from US$349/month, better performance

The jump from Growth to Team is significant, and the jump to Dedicated even more so. At US$349/month, you’re spending US$4,188/year on a platform you don’t own, running on infrastructure you don’t control, with performance you can’t optimise. Scale to multiple apps or higher capacity needs, and you’re well above US$6,000/year — approaching the point where custom software starts making economic sense.

And unlike custom software, the cost never stops. You’re paying monthly forever. Miss a payment and your application goes offline.

When Bubble Genuinely Makes Sense

Let’s be fair about where Bubble earns its place:

• MVPs and prototypes — validating an idea before committing to a full build. Bubble is excellent for this, and the speed-to-market advantage is real.
• Internal tools with small user counts — an internal dashboard or workflow tool used by 5-10 people. Performance and scale don’t matter as much here.
• Non-technical founders testing a concept — if you don’t have a technical co-founder and you need to show investors a working product, Bubble is a legitimate path.
• Temporary solutions — tools with a known shelf life, where the vendor lock-in doesn’t matter because you’ll replace it within 12 months anyway.

The Transition Path

If you’ve built something valuable in Bubble and you’re hitting these limits, here’s the practical approach:

Treat your Bubble app as a living specification. Every page, every workflow, every data type you’ve built is a detailed requirements document. This is genuinely valuable — it means you’ve already done the hardest part of software development, which is figuring out what the software needs to do.

Export your data early. Don’t wait until you’re ready to migrate. Start regular CSV exports of your critical data now. Build the habit of having your data outside Bubble, so when you’re ready to move, the data migration isn’t a scramble.

Prioritise what matters. You don’t need to rebuild the entire app at once. Identify the screens and workflows that are causing the most pain — the slow pages, the failing workflows, the bottlenecks — and start there.

Plan for the overlap. Running your Bubble app and the new system in parallel during migration is normal. It costs you a few months of Bubble subscription, but it means your team isn’t disrupted and you have a fallback if anything needs adjustment.

The businesses that get the most from Bubble are the ones that use it intentionally — as a prototyping tool, not a permanent platform. Build fast, validate the idea, learn what your users actually need, and then invest in something that can grow with you. That’s not a failure of Bubble. That’s exactly what it’s designed for.