Every tech company right now is wrestling with the same question: How do you evolve when AI has rewritten the rules of the game — without losing what made you special in the first place?

Two weeks ago, we stopped hedging and gave our answer.

We gathered every employee at Bubble and did something that felt both necessary and uncomfortable. We laid out our complete vision for the next five years — not the sanitized external version, but the real one, with all its potential and all its demands. We were honest about where we’ve been, what needs to change, and why the next few years will define whether we fulfill our mission or watch someone else do it.

Then we asked everyone to make a choice.

We’re sharing this publicly because we believe every builder on our platform deserves to know: The team behind Bubble is all in. And we think our story might matter to anyone else navigating this moment of transformation.

The opportunity we’re building for

Thirteen years ago, we had an audacious idea: build something fundamentally better than code. Not code that’s easier to write, but an entirely different way of communicating with computers‌ — ‌a visual language that anyone could understand without a computer science degree.

Today, 6 million builders have created on Bubble. This year alone, over $1.1 billion in transactions has moved through apps built on our platform. These aren’t prototypes gathering dust. They’re real businesses creating real economic value.

We built something that worked. But we also learned an uncomfortable truth: What works at one stage can constrain you at the next.

The early years taught us incredible discipline. Seven years bootstrapped created real strengths — customer-centricity, fiscal discipline, doing more with less. But those same years also embedded habits that no longer served us: conservatism where we needed boldness, slow-and-steady where the market demanded acceleration, homegrown systems where we needed world-class infrastructure.

The market changed faster than we did.

Vibe-coding tools exploded onto the scene in 2025, and suddenly every founder could generate a working prototype in minutes. Describe what you want, and AI handles everything — not just the initial build, but every iteration thereafter.

We watched this happen and knew something important: We didn’t want to compete with vibe-coding on its terms. We needed to offer something fundamentally better. Not just the speed of AI-driven development, but the ability to create exactly what you want‌ — ‌real, deployable, secure, and scalable applications, not prototypes hiding technical debt and security vulnerabilities.

Because our real competitor has always been code.

If we want visual development to become the standard over the next five, 10, even 20 years, we have to keep our vision focused there. We can’t allow ourselves to be distracted by inadequate, albeit flashy, challengers. We have to build something so clearly better that the choice becomes obvious.

That opportunity — making Bubble the standard for how the world builds software — is sitting in front of us. But opportunity doesn’t equal success. Execution does.

And that execution requires more than product roadmaps and feature releases. It requires an honest conversation about who we are and who we need to become.

The uncomfortable conversation

World-changing ideas remain just ideas without the hunger and action to make them reality. And sometimes, when you’re rewriting the rules of the game you created, you have to evolve not just your product but your entire culture.

That’s where we found ourselves. We had the right team. We had the right vision. But we also recognized the uncomfortable truth: our execution had been too slow, with inconsistent quality, in a market that's accelerating faster every day.

As leaders, we own everything we love about our current culture and everything that's been holding us back. Any change had to start with us.

So we started by taking a hard look at ourselves as a leadership team and beginning the work of changing our own mindset: moving faster without sacrificing quality, chasing more after every achievement, ruthlessly prioritizing the work that makes Bubble the only choice.

Then we gathered the team and laid it all out. We were clear on the upsides of achieving our goals. We were equally clear on the work required to get there. We didn’t hold back — ‌our team is sharp and can handle the truth.

And then we asked them to make a decision.

We asked everyone to reflect on whether they were truly confident and excited about the future of this company, and whether they could commit to doing what it takes to make Bubble everything it can be.

If the answer was yes — if they wanted to be part of building the future of software development here with us — then let’s do this together.

If the answer was no — if their career priorities had shifted or this level of commitment wasn’t the right fit anymore — we accepted that with respect and gratitude for their contributions. We provided financial support so that anyone who chose a different path could find something better aligned with where they are in their career right now.

This wasn’t about forcing anyone out, and it wasn’t about reducing headcount — in fact, we’re going to be aggressively hiring in 2026. It was about ensuring that everyone who stayed was genuinely choosing to be here.

95% of our team chose to stay.

What that means is profound: Everyone at Bubble now knows that every single person around them has made the same commitment they have. That clarity and collective commitment changes everything.

What this means for our users and our community

For our team, rising to this moment means reigniting our hunger for challenge. It means moving faster, pushing ourselves on deadlines, and challenging one another with hard questions. It means working harder to deliver what our community needs.

This doesn’t mean we’re sacrificing the things that make our culture special — the thoughtfulness, the customer focus, the genuine care for craft and respect for one another. It means we’re channeling those strengths with renewed intensity and urgency.

For our community, it means you can build with confidence.

You can trust that the team behind Bubble is fully committed to supporting you and stewarding this platform’s continued growth. We’re not hedging our bets. We’re not playing it safe. We’re investing everything we can into making Bubble a powerful place to build.

We’re sitting on top of one of the biggest opportunities in the history of software, and we're not going to sleep on this moment.

For the market, it means we’re not playing catch-up to vibe-coding tools. We’re defining what comes after them.

We’re building the future of software development in a way that stays true to our original mission: making building accessible to everyone, not just those who can understand and edit code.

Here’s our bet

One year from now, we’ll look back at this moment and know with certainty whether we rose to meet it.

We’re betting we will.

We’ve been here before. We invented a new way for people to talk to computers thirteen years ago. Now we’re doing it again.

If you're a founder or builder, know that Bubble is committed to being your platform of choice. If you're a leader in a similar place, remember that intentional transparency with your team allows them to truly join you on the journey. And if you’re a prospective employee inspired by this mission and ready to build the next era of software development, we welcome you to join us.

The opportunity is here. The team is committed. And we’re just getting started.