A Primer on Bubble.io

So you’ve decided you want to make an app. You might think you have some amazing new business idea, or some ingenious solution for something that you can believe no one’s thought of before. Whatever your motivations, you decide to do your research and find that app development isn’t as simple as it seems.

You hear about things like IDEs, HTML, and the daunting world of programming, where up is down and every turn leads to a compilation error. Before long, you think only someone with a computer science degree could understand all this and lose heart. Maybe you could just find someone else who understands all the jargon, or maybe you could just give up. Then you hear about Bubble and no-code development solutions.

Suddenly, you perk up and start looking up Bubble tutorials on blogs just like this. You realize it’s unbelievably easy to start up an app using Bubble! What were you even thinking of programming for?

Then, hours into your newly-found Bubble rabbit hole, you realize you might’ve missed something important. What is Bubble? What is no-code development? And most importantly, how much will you need to pay for this?

Fortunately for you asking these questions, we’ve got the answers right here and more. Even if you think you’re a seasoned Bubble developer, you might have some long-simmering questions that you never really thought to look up, questions we might also have the answers for right here.
If so, keep reading for some no-code web development support as we answer some Bubble FAQs.

What is no-code development?
“No-code development” refers to a web development approach that allows programmers and non-programmers alike to create apps using a visual user interface to create instructions and manipulate data. This allows developers to do what would take many lines of complex code with a few simple drags, drops, and maybe flipping a few toggles.

While it does not subtract some highly technical aspects such as organizing data into abstract structures and working with logic to design algorithms, it makes these tasks significantly less daunting by allowing the user to do them with graphical interfaces instead of the rigid syntax of programming languages.

This absolutely does not mean that no-code development is computationally inferior to programming. Whatever can be done with programming can be done with most no-code platforms, though sometimes not to the same level of efficiency. The pros and cons relative to code programming differ from platform to platform.

What is Bubble?
Bubble is a no-code development platform that was founded in 2012. As a development platform, it is specifically oriented towards building websites and web-based applications. It is distinct from website-builders like Wix and Squarespace in that it provides the capability to build entire applications instead of template-based websites.

If you’re thinking about how it compares against traditional frameworks like Ruby on Rails and React, you should know that Bubble was itself created specifically to replace other frameworks and back-end technologies.

If you’re really into the theoretical side of computer science, it should greatly reassure you to know that Bubble is Turing complete according to its founder. This means that any algorithms, procedures, or programs that can be done using regular programming languages (which are also Turing complete) can be done with Bubble too.

Bubble apps work best in web browsers, though they can be ported to native mobile apps – a process you can find more about here.

It should be noted though, that while Bubble has a vast range of capabilities, that doesn’t mean it’s the best for all applications. For example, Bubble isn’t optimized to create dynamic graphics and complex mathematics. In cases like that, Bubble allows you to make use of Javascript via their plugins.

How much is Bubble going to cost me?
Bubble provides its core functionality and more for no cost at all. Just make an account and create an app, and you’ll be given access to all of Bubble’s core features.

These core features include the Bubble application editor, hosting for your app, use of the robust backend database systems, and connections to hundreds of third-party services, among many others.

One step up gives you the Personal plan at 25 or 29 dollars a month, depending on whether you plan to pay annually or monthly.

The personal plan adds the ability to customize your domain and branding, along with data backups for the past 7 days and 10 GBs of file storage, on top of what Bubble already gives you with the free plan.

After the personal plan is the Professional and Production plans, costing 115 and 475 dollars per month on annual payment. Both give increased server capacity, for when your app needs to scale with a much larger user base, along with the ability to allow more people to edit your app, and even more file storage – 20 and 50 gigabytes respectively. They also allow you to run daily workflows and routines.

How can I learn to use Bubble?
By virtue of being a no-code development platform, Bubble is extremely easy to learn, especially for non-coders without previous programming experience. According to Bubble themselves, they find that those without coding experience were able to pick up the skills needed to develop in Bubble within one to two weeks.

The people behind Bubble offer interactive tutorials to make the learning process fun and memorable. They also provide extensive documentation for deeper delves into the nitty gritty of the technical details that is simple and easy to read.

Sites like ours here at Bubblehelper are also more than open to providing you with tips, tutorials, and technical support for little to no cost. If you feel like that’s not enough, you can also hire agencies that can develop your Bubble app for you. Once they’re done, since Bubble is so simple to use, you won’t even need to go back to the original developers to make minor tweaks.

With that, we can conclude our little primer on Bubble. Hopefully you now know how Bubble works, and how it can massively help you and your app. We also hope that we here at Bubblehelper can continue helping you in your journey with Bubble by providing web app support.