5 Expensive Mistakes Big Bubble Agencies Make (And How to Avoid Them)

You just paid a gold-level agency $80 grand to build your Bubble app. But here's the thing. I'm about to show you the 5 expensive mistakes they're probably going to make that likely are going to cost you thousands more to fix. And I know this because I'm the guy people call when everything falls apart. I'm Dennis H. Lewis from ratio.dev, and I've been in tech for 40 years. And at Ratio, we get called in pretty much every week to audit applications or rescue projects that have gotten stranded. And honestly, most of the time when a founder is frustrated and their launch gets, keeps getting delayed and delayed, it's because of the same recurring issues from big agencies. Now, look, I'm not here to pick a fight with these agencies. They do generally, generally do good work and they have a real place in the market. But when you're hiring a big agency, you're buying into their backend system. And that system is built for their convenience. And not yours. So in this video, I'm going to show you number 1, why having 7 to 10 developers on your project actually slows things down. Number 2, the architectural decisions that lock you in and make you dependent. And 3, how to spot these problems before you're stuck with a, you know, $150,000 maintenance nightmare. So stick around to the end because I'm also going to give you free access to our resource center where you can Uh, you know, get access to all the plugins and everything that we have vetted for our customers. But first, let me tell you about a project we rescued last year. So a founder came to us, let's call him Mark. He'd spent 6 months and just shy of $100 grand with a well-known agency. The app wasn't launched yet. It was buggy. And every time he asked a question, he got a different answer from a different person. And when I opened up his Bubble app, I immediately knew what happened. I could see. 7 to 10 different developer personnel added as collaborators in the app. You know, they had somebody working on workflows. They had somebody else on UI. They had somebody else for the mobile responsive. They had another person working on integrations. There were 2 project managers, you know, added into the app as well. And here's the problem with that. All of those people were doing piecework. They didn't likely understand the actual business proposition. They were just executing tickets. So what I mean by that is somebody was sending them an order, go into this app, fix this problem, boom. And that, you know, and then move on to the next problem for the next customer. And there's massive overhead coordinating all those people. And when something breaks, good luck figuring out who's responsible for it. And now compare that to how we work here at Ratio. Usually it's me and Tony. Maybe we'll bring in one specialist for something specific, or because we've got, you know, there's some specific reason for your project, but we both understand your entire business. This bot, your users, your goals. And that means that when you ask a question, you get a consistent answer. You're not talking to, you know, 10 different people. And when we build something, it's built with the whole picture in mind, not just one isolated piece. And I mean that because also we will question you as you give us instructions. We're not just robots. We, you know, we are constantly thinking about, okay, is that the best way to do this? Can we achieve the goal easier by, you know, taking another another route? Does it make sense in the big picture? And if something, you know, doesn't sit well with us, we'll tell you, we'll say, hey, are you sure you want to do it this way and not that way? Or, you know, maybe it would be a good idea to incorporate this as well at this point in time, because it will make, you know, your offer more interesting to your customers. You know, that's the kind of, you know, real-world partnering that we like to do. But problem number 2, goes even further and it's called what we would call architectural overkill. And it's even more insidious because this is where these big agencies lock you in. And, you know, I see this often with agencies who push customers into making architectural decisions, like pushing all their backend to Xano or Airtable when it really wasn't necessary. And don't get me wrong. There's sometimes that that makes perfect sense and there are legitimate reasons to use an external backend or to, you know, integrate with another platform. For example, when we build AI solutions, we almost always use a middleware called Relevance because it allows our customers to be more autonomous against different LLMs that change constantly. We think that's a legitimate advantage. But often these big agencies just are just following their own SOP. And they, they have a Xano specialist and they have an Airtable developer and they just follow a a framework that has worked for them in the past, and it is probably great for some really big enterprise applications, but often it's overkill for smaller applications, or they're selling this idea that maybe 4 or 5 years down the road, you're, when you're just so successful, you won't have to make this big change because you'll, you've already done it. And look, personally, I hope that my customers 4 or 5 years down the road have that kind of problem because that means they've been really successful. And remember that 4 or 5 years down the road, Bubble is going to be 4 or 5 years better. Okay. Right now, you can literally scale to hundreds of thousands of real-world users without going outside of Bubble. And if your agency is pushing you towards a more complicated external database or backend platform or something else, you have to understand that that comes with not just a platform cost, but it comes with an understanding cost. And it comes with adding in complexity that you're going to have to maintain forever. And that's why we like to keep things simple upfront, because if you're using the appropriate technology, you're most likely going to be able to pivot faster. You're going to be able to adapt. And for us, one of the key, most important ideas is we want our founders to understand what we're building. Okay. When you go into and look at a backend workflow in, in Bubble, you can read it like a book. Okay. That don't mean that our founders need to be able to create workflows and develop everything from scratch. Some of them do, some of them are really good at it, but I want you to be comfortable enough that you can at least look at it and understand it. And That is going to be much harder when you're— when your tech stack is getting more complicated. And when you're integrating in JavaScript modules and you're putting in, you know, you're solving some problems with code and some problems with an external backend and some problems with an integration with Amazon S3, or, you know, there could be all sorts of things that happen. And sometimes they make perfect sense. And that's the way you should do things. But often I've seen, and this is real-world experience here, the big agencies are just following a recipe that has worked for them. And that is generally good for big enterprise customers because they have tech departments, they have IT departments, they're already comfortable managing infrastructure and the downsides aren't as big and the budgets are there to handle it. For many founders, many business owners, That is complexity that doesn't serve you well. Problem number 3, the communications breakdown. This is probably the most frustrating for most founders. Customers come to us and they're saying they feel overwhelmed. That when I ask them what's wrong, they say the same thing. I explain my vision to 6 different people. Every time I have a meeting, it's someone new and nobody seems to understand what I'm actually trying to build. This is what happens when you're working with a large organization that has complicated internal protocols. You have to adapt to them. I had a client last year, she'd been working with an agency for 8 months. She told me, Dennis, I feel like I'm playing telephone tag. I explain something to the project manager who explains it to the developer who explains it to the outsourced subcontractor. And what gets built is nothing like what I asked for. And every meeting there's different faces, there's different contexts. It feels like we're starting over. And that's just wrong. I mean, when you work with us here at Ratio, you get me and Tony. And that's it. We're in deep. We understand your business model, your users, your vision. I've spent my entire career learning how to listen and translate what founders and business owners need into working applications. You don't have to explain the same thing 15 times to 15 different people. We remember, we get it, we're building with you, and we're not just executing tickets. Number 4, the plugin and dependency trap. Okay. This is one of my pet peeves, plugins. And often when I audit apps built by big agencies, I'll see 25, 30, 40 plugins installed. And here's why that's a problem. Most of these plugins, when are loaded on page load on every page of your application, that's not true of every plugin. It's certainly not true of the Bubble native plugins, but that makes us cautious when we add plugins and look, we use plugins in our apps and a big application will require a lot of plugins, but often these Goldett-level agencies, they just have a, you know, list of plugins and they install them in all the apps they work on because that way they know that their, their templates and their frameworks and their stuff, it's all there. It's already, you know, they, they reteach their developers a new way of doing something. They always do it the same way, but that can mean that you've got 10 plugins that you're barely using or are not really necessary for the functionality of your application. And it's bogging things down and you have to be on top of every time those plugins are updated and does that, could that break something and maintenance gets more complicated. We always try to build with as few plugins as possible. And when we do need plugins, we first go to the Bubble native plugins because they, the Bubble plugins just load better. They don't require, you know, they won't load on every page if they're not needed. And then we have a list of vetted plugins that we know work well and don't bog down your application. And we always go in that order. Can we build it natively? Can we directly connect with an API and avoid somebody's, you know, plugin that's in the middle? And then last resort, can we go to a native Bubble plugin? And then, okay, can we use one of the plugins that we already know really works well? And if you follow that recipe, your application will work better. You will save money down the road. Problem number 5, the real cost. And this is the one that hurts the most. The real cost isn't just the money you paid upfront. It's the opportunity cost. It's the 6 months you lost. It's the momentum you didn't build because you were babysitting all of these different people in your app when you should have been building a community to launch your app with. Look, I've worked with founders who have literally spent $150,000 with big agencies and they got an app that they couldn't understand or modify, and they had to go and spend another 50 grand with us to basically rebuild it. That's, you know, maybe literally $125,000 that could have gone to marketing or could have gone to, you know, acquiring new customers or building something even more spectacular. And it could have been launched in 3 months instead of 7 or 8. And look, I'm not saying that these big agencies are evil or incompetent. For the right project, you know, big enterprise applications with big budgets, they're awesome. But if you're a founder with a vision and a limited budget and you need to move fast, you really should be working with somebody who can roll up their sleeves, sit down with you, is going to be with you every step of the way, and going to understand and feel like a part of your project. So what do you do if you're working with an agency and you're starting to see these red flags? First of all, ask questions. How many people are working on your project? Why are You know, you, why are you using or recommending that I use these external platforms? Can you explain this architecture to me? If you get vague answers or pushback, that's a red flag. Get a second opinion. Seriously, we do audits all the time. Sometimes we'll tell people, hey, your agency's doing great. Keep, keep going. Otherwise, other times we'll tell them, hey, course correct before things get worse. And third, educate yourself. Like I said earlier, you don't have to be an expert Bubble developer or AI developer. But you need to be able to understand what's being built. That's the core benefit of no-code is that you can understand it. Okay. You don't have to be a coder. So put in a bit of effort there to be on top of what's being built. Obviously, you know, if you never built an application, you're not going to build your application successfully the first time out the box, probably without some help, or if you do, it's going to have lots of problems and you're going to call us and that's another video. But if you feel like things are not quite like they should be, feel free to reach out to us, ratio.dev. Set up a call. We'll be glad to look at what's going on, give you our honest opinion, and we'll help you out if we can. And if we think things are going okay, or it's, you're on track, that's what we'll tell you. We're not gonna, we're not gonna try and steal you away from somebody else just because it would be good for us. Hopefully you found this video helpful. Feel free to go to ratio.dev and sign up for our free no-code resource center. We've got a vetted added plugins in there. We've got tutorial videos, podcast episodes, great books to read, all sorts of great information that's being constantly updated. It's totally free to sign up. And also check out our school community called Bubble Gods. We have courses that are structured in there. We're doing live Q&A sessions and we're building a community of people, of founders, of business owners, just like you who really want to leverage the power of no-code and the power of AI. To create competitive advantages for their businesses. And that's what we, we see as the future. Give the video a like, subscribe to our channel. I mean, that means so much to us. And thanks a lot. I'll see you on the next video.