Bubble Wrapped: 2023 Year in Review

Happy almost New Year! We, along with the broader Bubble team, have a lot to be grateful for, and so many of those great things wouldn’t have been possible without all of you. Whether you launched an app on Bubble, interacted with others on the forum, or simply read this blog, thank you. 

Our priority in 2023 was making sure that our platform was designed to scale with you — critical if we’re going to achieve our mission of changing the way software gets built to unlock more economic opportunity across the world. From introducing new version control to receiving our SOC 2 Type II report and launching our new Enterprise plan — not to mention hosting our first-ever in-person user conference in NYC — we’re deeply proud of the progress this team has made.

In celebration, we want to take a closer look at exactly how far we — and you — have come this year.

A vibrant, thriving Bubble community

This year took Bubble to new heights, and that’s thanks to the incredible community of users from all over the world. You’re using Bubble to build and innovate … and you’re succeeding. That’s a powerful thing. (And with 30.2 million pageviews on the forum, you’re not just building, you’re collaborating.)

When we say our community is global, we mean it. Take a look at the top 10 cities using Bubble:

1. São Paulo, Brazil
2. Paris, France
3. New York City, United States
4. London, United Kingdom
5. Lagos, Nigeria
6. Tokyo, Japan
7. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 
8. Sydney, Australia
9. Los Angeles, United States
10. Delhi, India

That’s six out of seven continents — anyone know if there’s a big programming community we can tap into in Antarctica? This is an incredible testament to the power of no-code and your enthusiasm. You're expanding the bounds of Bubble, and you’re pushing us to do the same. 

We got to connect with our users online and in-person a lot this year. We hosted a Bubble Developer Summit online, with attendees from more than 110 places around the world and more than 1,100 nominations for our first-ever Developer Awards. 

Congratulations again to the winners:

• Bubble Mentor: Renato Asse
• Bubble Trailblazer: Victor Nihoul & Wesley Wasielewski of Flusk
• Bubble Community Champion: Thibault Marty

Just a few months later, we were joined by 300 people in New York City and thousands virtually at BubbleCon, our very first user conference! It was incredible to meet so many of you, watch our first all-women Immerse cohort present at Demo Day, and celebrate the Bubble for Good Hackathon winners. 

A platform built to scale with you

As this community grows, so does our platform. There were more than 3.6 million Bubble apps as of 2023, and with more than 14.5 billion (yes, with a ‘b’) workflows run in 2023, there’s no sign of slowing down. 

One of the biggest changes we made this year was the introduction of workload, our new usage-based pricing metric, alongside the new set of pricing plans. It didn’t come without challenges, and isn’t perfect yet, but it was a critical shift for the long-term health of the company so that we can continue to power your businesses for many years to come. The team has worked hard to improve the pricing experience since then, including real-time usage reporting to give you more insight, flexibility, and control, and we are continuing to listen to feedback on ways to make improvements.

We also had several especially exciting product launches in 2023:

• New version control created new branch types and more seamless collaboration for teams building together
• The Bubble Developer Certification officially raised the bar for devs (and their clients).
• Bubble for Enterprise brought you a new plan with features like single sign-on (SSO) and centralized account management, and the release of our SOC 2 Type II report strengthened security for all users.
• Some big-time performance improvements made creating, deleting, and updating things in the editor 3x faster, and we made “make changes to a list of things” and “schedule API workflow on a list” 2x and 10x faster, respectively.

And we added some other highly requested new features, too:

• The brand new Table element makes it much easier to add sleek tables to your app.
• Customizable properties give reusable elements a lot more flexibility.
• Custom breakpoints make building for multiple screen sizes more efficient.

A few of your favorite things 

And here’s some more of what you loved in 2024:

From the academy

For new and experienced users alike, the academy is full of resources to learn key concepts on Bubble. That said, these lessons were the biggest hits:

• The Getting Started series, which helps familiarize new users with the editor and logic of the Bubble ecosystem.
• Short but sweet: Signing a User Up.
• Intro to APIs and the API Connector, an essential course that takes a deep dive into APIs.

From the blog

You were most interested in the how-tos, whether that was getting started on Bubble, learning how to build Instagram without code, or using OpenAI to create your own ChatGPT clone.

From the showcase

We love seeing businesses built on Bubble succeed. These showcase stories are some of the very best: 

• Strabo, the fintech startup helping users build their investment portfolios that’s now valued at $1.5 million.
• Byword, the AI-powered tool generating SEO-focused content for more than 4,000 users.
• Circlehome, the app disrupting the homeswapping market that went from accelerator to pre-seed-funded in under a year.

From social media

We’re genuinely impressed by your enthusiasm. These were some of the moments you were most excited about:

Discussing just how powerful Bubble can be:

Celebrating in-person at BubbleCon:

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Bubble making it to Times Square!

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Announcing our first all-women Immerse cohort:

Thank you again for such an amazing year. Here’s to everything on the horizon in 2024 — AI, native mobile, and so much more.

See you in the new year!

— Josh and Emmanuel