My Client Asked Why I Charge $180/Hour When Bubble.io is Free — So I Built Their Dashboard in Both

So my client sends me this Slack message —

6 min readOct 31, 2025

“Hey, I’ve been reading about Bubble.io. don’t you think $180/hr. is bit too much, when I can build this myself for free?”

Fair question, honestly.

I could’ve sent him a long explanation about scalability and vendor lock-in and all that shit. But instead I said —

“Let me build your dashboard in both. Then you decide.”

that was a bold move cuz AI literally sometime fucked you up…but I know where it lags without human.. :) btw He agreed.

What Even Is Bubble.io?

For people who don’t know — Bubble is a “no-code” platform. Basically, you drag and drop elements on a screen, connect them to a database, set up some workflows, and boom — you have a working web app.

No JavaScript. No backend code. No deployment headaches.

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Written by Is It Vritra - SDE I

2.5K followers

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Going on tech shits! AI is my pronouns

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Nov 13

"𝙍𝙚𝙢𝙚𝙢𝙗𝙚𝙧 𝙈𝙖𝙣, 𝙒𝙝𝙚𝙣 𝙘𝙡𝙞𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙨 𝙝𝙞𝙧𝙚 𝙢𝙚, 𝙩𝙝𝙚𝙮’𝙧𝙚 𝙣𝙤𝙩 𝙟𝙪𝙨𝙩 𝙥𝙖𝙮𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙛𝙤𝙧 𝙘𝙤𝙙𝙚. 𝘽𝙪𝙩 𝙥𝙖𝙮𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙛𝙤𝙧;
- 𝙎𝙘𝙖𝙡𝙖𝙗𝙞𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙮
- 𝙊𝙬𝙣𝙚𝙧𝙨𝙝𝙞𝙥
- 𝙋𝙧𝙚𝙙𝙞𝙘𝙩𝙞𝙗𝙞𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙮
- 𝙁𝙡𝙚𝙭𝙞𝙗𝙞𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙮
- 𝙋𝙚𝙧𝙛𝙤𝙧𝙢𝙖𝙣𝙘𝙚"...

302

Nov 12

IMO, one of the hardest "sells" for us software engineers is that clients are getting a great price for our years of experience. We been there through the fires and production outages and database crawls and we often know how to dx and fix. And…

148

Nov 12

I like the way you compared it! 👍

103

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