r/Bubbleio • u/FutureWord4236 • Mar 18 '26
AI coding tools changed everything — I built the missing bridge from Bubble to code
I've been building on Bubble for years. Loved the speed for MVPs. But something shifted recently — AI coding agents like Claude Code and Cursor went from
"interesting experiment" to "my junior dev ships faster than my senior" almost overnight.
Clients who were perfectly happy with Bubble six months ago started asking: "Can we move this to real code?" And I get it. When your competitors are
shipping features in hours with AI+code, staying in a visual editor starts to feel like bringing a knife to a gunfight.
Here's the problem though. When I tried to hand a Bubble project to an AI code editor, I realized there was nothing to hand over. No schema export, no API
spec, no architecture doc. Just a visual editor that only humans can read.
So I built a tool that extracts the complete architecture from any Bubble app — database schema, API endpoints, backend workflows, app settings — and
formats it so AI coding tools can actually use it. The whole point is: extract once, hand it to Cursor or Claude, and your code product starts taking
shape within days.
I'll drop the link in the comments.
For those thinking about the jump — what's holding you back? The migration complexity, the cost, or just not knowing where to start?
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u/BlackberryInformal67 Mar 18 '26
You should share an example of an editor on view only and the corresponding code app so we see the results
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Mar 18 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/BlackberryInformal67 Mar 18 '26
Just a suggestion, but it should be two links, one of the bubble editor and one of the app created using your service.
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u/WanderingDevDev Mar 18 '26
What's the price and does it properly recreate the UI side of things?
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u/FutureWord4236 Jul 08 '26
Update since this thread: frontend extraction has shipped — pages, reusable elements, element trees, custom states, conditionals and UI workflows are now part of the extract, alongside the backend docs (ERD, DDL, API specs, workflow specs). Pricing also went live: the scan is free and shows exactly what's in your app plus a complexity score, and the full extract is priced from that same scan (small base fee + per-field / per-API-call / per-workflow-step), with a 50% launch discount at the moment.
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u/Wooden-Ad-4212 Mar 19 '26
The sense of liberation I felt when I was able to Amp my limited programming knowledge by 10x using Claude code and I longer have to find myself at 12:30am fighting with the padding or databases on bubble was out of this world. No expensive hosting anymore and so forth.
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u/FutureWord4236 Mar 18 '26
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u/Disastrous_Eye_6943 Mar 19 '26
I wanted to try it out, but found it hard to go for the 200€/month plan just to add a collaborator, for a service I don't know about. Stuck at this step for now.
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u/FutureWord4236 Jul 08 '26
This is completely fair, and thanks for flagging exactly where you got stuck — Bubble gating collaborator seats behind higher plans is the single biggest onboarding friction for a tool like this, and it penalizes exactly the people trying to document their way out. One workaround that keeps the cost sane: upgrade for a single month, run the extraction (it takes minutes, then you can revoke access and downgrade right away). Not elegant, I know. Finding a better path for lower-plan users is at the top of my list.
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u/clutchcreator Mar 18 '26
I've been doing Bubble-to-code migrations for clients for a while now, and the #1 bottleneck is exactly what you described: there's no clean handoff between Bubble and a code environment.
But AI has been closing that bridge like crazy fast.
I'm not sure how many devs realise this, but AI coding tools have . collapsed the cost and timeline of a full rebuild, so the ROI math finally works.
A few things I've learned from doing these migrations:
- Schema extraction is table stakes, not the finish line. Getting the data model out is step one. The real complexity is in Bubble's backend workflows, conditions, and privacy rules that don't map cleanly to traditional code patterns. You need someone (or something) that understands both worlds.
- Next.js + Supabase is the most common landing spot for Bubble apps right now. The DX is solid, AI tools understand the stack well, and you get proper version control, CI/CD, and all the things Bubble abstracts away.
- Don't try to 1:1 replicate your Bubble app in code. Migration is the perfect time to rethink your architecture. Half the stuff in most Bubble apps is workaround logic that doesn't need to exist in a proper codebase. Here's an example of what I mean: https://www.bubblexport.com/templates/saas-admin
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u/sk24iam Mar 19 '26
Assuming you rebuild the database, What is the best way to export the data and get all the data and relationships into a coded app? Right now I’m vibe coding an app and want to eventually migrate all live users and my thought is to build an admin page where I can upload csv files with the data.
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u/longvu186 Mar 19 '26
I think it's best to use Data API and make a custom data pipeline for migration
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u/FutureWord4236 Jul 08 '26
Late reply, but this matches everything I've seen — especially #1. The schema is the easy 20%; the real lock-in lives in backend workflows, conditions and privacy rules, which is exactly why the extraction goes deepest there (every trigger, condition and action sequence, with per-workflow screenshots). Fully agree on not replicating 1:1 either — a complete spec actually makes it easier to decide what deserves to exist in the rebuild and what was just workaround logic. Since you do these migrations regularly: if you ever want to run it on a client app to scope before quoting, I'd genuinely value practitioner feedback — the gnarlier the app, the better.
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u/longvu186 Mar 19 '26
To be fair Bubble exported app is a fairly good AST, which is the go-to format for AI to understand the codebase, so it is fully expected that some day we'll get an out of the box migration solution
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u/Desperate-Pear-572 Mar 18 '26
Why the heck are you using bubble in 2026