I watched a friend lose $50,000 on Bubble. Not all at once—that would have been merciful. It happened slowly, over eighteen months, like watching someone drown in shallow water while insisting they're fine.
Let me tell you what happened. Maybe it saves you from making the same mistake.
The Setup
My friend had a solid idea. A B2B marketplace connecting suppliers with restaurants. Nothing revolutionary, but the unit economics worked on paper. He'd done the customer interviews. Had letters of intent. The problem was real.
He hired a "Bubble expert" and a CTO who claimed to know the platform inside out. The CTO talked a good game during interviews. Knew all the buzzwords. Promised the MVP would be ready in three months.
The first red flag should have been obvious: the CTO didn't push back on anything. Every feature request got a "yes, we can do that." No technical trade-offs discussed. No architecture conversations. Just agreeable nodding and Bubble tutorials on YouTube.
The Slow Burn
Month one: The basic screens looked fine. Login, dashboard, a few forms. Progress felt real.
Month three: Things got complicated. The supplier matching algorithm needed actual logic. The notification system required external integrations. The payment flow touched multiple APIs. Suddenly, simple features took weeks instead of days.
Month five: Performance problems appeared. With just 200 test users, pages loaded slowly. The CTO blamed Bubble's servers. Said they'd "optimize later."
Month eight: The first major pivot. Half the features got scrapped because Bubble couldn't handle the complexity. The marketplace model shifted. The CTO said this was normal. "All startups pivot."
Month twelve: They hit what I now know is called the "Workload Unit wall." Bubble charges based on server operations. Their monthly bill jumped from $200 to $2,400. For an app with maybe 500 real users.
Month fifteen: The CTO quit. Just... left. Cited "creative differences." What he meant was: he'd built something he couldn't fix, and he knew it.
Month eighteen: My friend hired an actual developer to assess the situation. The verdict was brutal: there was no code to export. Everything lived inside Bubble's proprietary system. Migrating to real infrastructure meant rebuilding from scratch. Cost estimate: $80,000. They'd already spent $50,000.
The startup died three weeks later.
What Actually Went Wrong
I've thought about this a lot. Here's what I saw:
The CTO was a platform user, not an engineer. He knew how to drag blocks in Bubble. He didn't know how to architect systems that scale. When problems appeared, he had no tools to diagnose them—because the platform doesn't give you that access.
Nobody planned for success. They built assuming 500 users. When the product showed promise, the architecture couldn't handle it. And by then, they were locked in.
The platform ate the budget. Between Bubble's pricing, the third-party integrations (because Bubble can't do much natively), and the "Bubble expert" consultant fees—the money disappeared into operational costs instead of building real assets.
The sunk cost fallacy kicked in hard. By month ten, everyone knew something was wrong. But $35,000 was already spent. "We're so close," they kept saying. They weren't close. They were stuck.
The Industry Reality
After watching this happen, I started paying attention. My friend's story wasn't unique.
Bubble's own community forums are filled with users reporting performance problems at scale. One detailed case study documented load times of 15-30 seconds for complex pages. Another user called Bubble's cost estimation tools "dangerously inaccurate"—their social app was projected to cost under $100/month but actually consumed thousands in Workload Units.
TechRepublic found that 54% of low-code users felt limited when trying to add third-party features. Thoughtworks documented what they call "the last 10% trap"—where the first 80% of building is fast, the next 10% is possible, and the final 10% is simply impossible within the platform's constraints.
One Medium post put it bluntly: "I ended up spending more than I would have if I had learned development from day one."
What Should Have Happened
With hindsight, the path was clear.
If the CTO had been an actual engineer, he would have said: "Bubble works for validation. We'll use it for three months to test the concept, then rebuild properly before we scale."
If my friend had pushed back on the timeline pressure, he would have discovered that the CTO couldn't answer basic architecture questions.
If they'd budgeted for migration from day one, the sticker shock at month eighteen wouldn't have killed the company.
And now, in 2026, there's another option that didn't exist when my friend started: AI-assisted development. Tools like Cursor and Claude Code can produce actual code nearly as fast as no-code platforms. The difference? You own what you build. You can deploy it anywhere. When you need to scale or pivot, you're not starting over.
The irony is painful. My friend chose Bubble because he wanted to move fast without technical complexity. He got the opposite: slow progress, maximum complexity, and zero portability.
The Lesson
No-code platforms aren't evil. They're tools. Like any tool, they work for specific jobs and fail spectacularly when misapplied.
Bubble is fine for internal tools. It's fine for simple landing pages. It's fine for prototypes that you plan to throw away.
It's not fine for products you expect to scale. It's not fine when you need custom logic. And it's definitely not fine when you're betting your company on it.
The next time someone tells you they can build your SaaS on a no-code platform, ask one question: What happens when we outgrow it?
If the answer involves the words "we'll figure it out" or "that's a future problem"—run.
Some lessons cost $50,000. I hope this one was free.
The BrightByte helps startups avoid the no-code trap. We build scalable systems from day one, using AI-assisted development that produces real code you own. If you're planning a product and wondering whether no-code is the right choice, let's talk before you learn the expensive way.
