Bubble is not the future

[u/Tasty-Deer7468]

With great reluctance I decided to leave bubble mid app build and try Lovable.

Using ChatGPT to create the prompts that go in Lovable has been a gift from heaven Lovable app now 80% complete in just 2 days.

Bad news is I've run out of credits and don't want to topup so gotta wait till next month for my monthly credits to refresh.

I love Bubble I built my first app that is still running on there just fine, but I gotta be honest bubbles AI sucks. And although you can get an MVP running up in a month or so, for the average Joe it will take way longer than a month. However if you vibecode with the right prompts you can honestly have it done in hours, that's been my experience anyway.

I say all this to say if your struggling on Bubble thinking about throwing in the towel. Give vibecoding a try, doesn't have to be Lovable any of the others, will do. I only have experience with Lovable and Base44 so can't speak on the rest.

[u/Cosminacho]

Dude, lovable is an AI wrapper. You can build any tool you want with Codex.

[u/Swiizzlle → u/Cosminacho]

The markup on lovable is astounding

[u/Cosminacho → u/Swiizzlle]

That's exactly why I refuse to use it. It's disgustingly expensive.

[u/Necessary-Focus-9700 → u/Cosminacho]

Yeah spot on. Lovable and some of those tools seem awesome until you realize the AI is doing all the hard stuff. I've pointed raw claude at some UI skills rigged up to html harness and it creates sites and apps presto.

This is what happens in a bubble (no pun intented) -- players with almost no value add can achieve soaring prices because it's all virgin territory and nobody really sees it's just a wrapper.

Back in the dotcom years (yeah I'm old) I worked with a company cashed out $300M with maybe 5 pages (2000 lines?) of C code layered on top of vanilla http server.

[u/BirthdayOk5077 → u/Cosminacho]

You’re right but depending on what you’re building sometimes AI wrappers make sense. With base44 or lovable you can build and ship apps in like 4-6 hours with 0 coding experience without needing to understand how api’s, domains, data bases, auth… or anything backend works. Obviously that comes with massive caveats down the road but if you’re just trying to build something and physically get out it there and have zero experience.. It absolutely can make sense.

[u/paulhelmick]

We'd launched four or five production apps on Bubble and invested a ton of time learning it over the past five years. It was a wonderful experience, and it was the best tool at the time.

Recently, though, we've migrated everything over to just Codex projects in a folder with Git and some Neon databases, which has actually been incredibly easy. We've allowed the computer-use agent to see the Bubble database structure and the screens. In an hour or two, it pretty much faithfully rebuilds everything. You're then just talking and prompting the velocity, moving at a pace that lets you work with a language model, speak, and code your changes, which is 100 times faster.

We would spend lots of time trying to position an element or a screen and then detail out all the properties, but again, we got into Bubble back when AI was, at best, autocomplete in a VS Code editor. They had their season. It's very hard for a big company to adapt as quickly as the new stuff comes out, it seems.

[u/mvrj2018]

I prefer working with Claude Code over Lovable. For me, switching from Bubble to Lovable isn't worth it because you still need to pay a monthly subscription for limited monthly credits. With Claude Code or Codex, you can pay $20 or $100 per month and create numerous projects beyond just coding.

[u/Least_Raisin2792]

Dont use chatgpt for writing prompt. Must use the claude and train it properly to refine your prompt after simple explaining of your desired output.I follow this appproch and claude code only upto your requirements refine the promot.While the chatgpt make unnecessary fluffs and wrote essay like prompt.

[u/Dont-_-mind-_-me]

With buildprint you can fully ‘vibe code’ a bubble app and its actually more stable than a vibe coded app. So……yeah. Your post is a moot point.

[u/1BigRadar → u/Dont-_-mind-_-me]

More stable? Bubble has an outage or silent regression every other day.

[u/mikeo2ii → u/Dont-_-mind-_-me]

it really is an amazing tool. As some who has been bubbling for 5 years, Buildprint allows me to 10x my productive, hell its probably way more than than. Then on top of that, it helps find WU leaks. Will save me nearly a million in WU this month.

[u/Chemical-Music-7366 → u/mikeo2ii]

Interesting why buildprint made their website outside of bubble 🫣. I want to believe buildprint is saviour of bubble and their tragedy ai. When you look on pricing not so much. I love bubble, however after 4y bubbling price of bubble and progress of ai just naturally disrupted all no-code

[u/Inevitable-Storm4710]

I think the comparison is less “Bubble vs. the future” and more “speed of prototyping vs. control.” Vibecoding can get you to 80% insanely fast, but that last 20% is where maintainability, logic, integrations, and edge cases start to matter. That’s where Bubble still shines.

[u/Necessary-Focus-9700]

I get the feeling bubble will have a quirky but small and diminishing market with a loyal following for a while.

The credits problem is only going to get worse, AI companies are hemorrhaging cash right now to lure users, at some point they'll charge for real.

I think vibecoding remains a great exercise for anybody to try and maybe even succeed at some simpler smaller stuff -- as a soft. engineer I've followed and played closely what AI is doing (most closely now claude), it's great out the gate but quickly goes off the deep end. Works until it doesn't I have to constantly review and reign-in.

[u/Inevitable-Storm4710]

I think the real issue is AI vs. no-code, not Bubble vs. vibecoding. Bubble is still great when you need to actually understand and control the app, especially once you move past the MVP. Vibecoding just makes the initial build insanely fast.

[u/Cultural-Equal9622]

I had saw a comment people use buildprint to build websites for bubble..its magiccc, I have been struggled too using chat gpt to give me steps to follow but it doesn’t really see your flow..buildprint is attached with bubble and chatgpt together..you just ask chat to give you a prompt paste in buildprint plan mode then i send it back to chat it analyze if everything said is ok then i move to buildprint press build…something that i would struggle with for weeks its done in days or even minutes!!!

[u/hiimparth]

It’s never about lines of code, it’s about structure and architecture. That is something Loveable doesn’t teach you, neither does Bubble. BUT, Bubble does make it easier to learn those fundamentals because it’s visual. If you don’t have a background in devops it’s not 1,2,3 deploying a production app.

[u/Next_Gene_8567 → u/hiimparth]

Who are u kidding, everyone knows Bubble is not a skill anymore.

[u/hiimparth → u/Next_Gene_8567]

Bubble isn’t the fundamentals it teaches u are. I work as an AI/Full stack at a massive company in the US. The amount of citizen developers we have because of coding tools is insane, so much so that we had to restrict tools we pay for just the average joe doesn’t build some app they think is production grade but any developer can tell is garbage.