How to Choose a Bubble Agency: A Practical Checklist
Development Strategy
Choosing a Bubble agency is one of the highest-leverage decisions in the early life of your product. The right partner ships a working application in weeks and leaves you with something you can run. The wrong one burns four months and leaves you with a Bubble app that needs a rescue. This checklist is the one we wish founders had when they came to us after a bad experience.
## Start with the basics
Before you look at portfolios, confirm three things:
- They build in Bubble as a primary tool. Not "we can do Bubble", actually Bubble. Agencies that treat it as a side offering write apps that need rebuilding within a year.
- They will own the project end to end. Design, build, integrations, deploy, handover. Chains of subcontractors are where quality dies.
- They will hand the app over to you cleanly. You should own the Bubble app, the domain, the Stripe account, and every credential from day one.
If any of those is shaky, walk away.
## Look at real work, not screenshots
Anyone can show a polished landing page. What you actually want to see, in this order:
1. A live application you can click into. Not a video, not a screenshot. The real app, with a demo account.
2. The editor view. Ask to see a 30-second screen-share inside one of their Bubble projects. Naming, structure, reusable elements, workflow organization. Five minutes here tells you more than a portfolio site ever will.
3. A reference call. Ten minutes with a previous client tells you everything about how they handle scope changes, missed deadlines, and bug fixes.
If they will not show editor view or set up a reference call, they are hiding something.
## The checklist
Use this exact list when you are evaluating a Bubble agency. We have seen all of these go wrong on rescue projects.
### Technical
- Do they use reusable elements consistently?
- Are workflows organized into folders, not a 200-row flat list?
- Do they set Bubble privacy rules per data type from day one?
- Do they version control with development and live branches?
- Can they show you their Bubble unit tests or QA process?
- Do they handle integrations natively (API connector, plugins) instead of always reaching for Make or Zapier?
### Process
- Is the scope written down with deliverables, not just an hourly estimate?
- Is there a fixed price for the v1 or only time-and-materials?
- What is the change request process and what does it cost?
- Who is the named project lead and are they available weekly?
- How do they communicate — Slack, Loom, weekly call, all of the above?
### Commercial
- Do you own the Bubble app, the database, and every secret from day one?
- Is there a defined post-launch support window included?
- What does ongoing Bubble maintenance cost after handover?
- Are payments milestone-based or hourly?
### Red flags
- They cannot show a single live, logged-in application
- They will only show videos, not real apps
- They will not give you editor access until launch
- Their estimate is suspiciously cheap (under $5,000 for a real SaaS MVP)
- They guarantee a launch date before scoping the project
- They want you to use their Stripe account or domain
## Pricing reality
Honest market numbers, end of 2025:
- Landing page or simple form app: $1,500 to $5,000
- MVP with auth, dashboard, payments: $8,000 to $25,000
- Full SaaS or marketplace: $20,000 to $80,000
- Enterprise internal tool: $30,000 to $150,000
Anyone significantly cheaper is either junior, offshore with no project management, or about to scope-creep you into the right number.
Anyone significantly more expensive needs to justify it with senior team, complex integrations, or compliance work.
## How to run the evaluation
Three weeks, three steps:
1. Week 1 — shortlist. Pick three to five agencies. Send each the same one-page brief.
2. Week 2 — calls and demos. 30-minute scoping call, request live editor walkthrough, request one reference.
3. Week 3 — proposals and decision. Compare scope, price, timeline, named team. Pick the one whose process you trust, not the cheapest.
Avoid public RFPs that take months. Two weeks of focused evaluation is enough.
## What we do differently
We are biased — we run a Bubble agency. The choices we made because we kept seeing them broken on rescue projects:
- Live editor walkthrough on every first call
- Fixed scope and fixed price for the v1
- Client owns everything from day one, no exceptions
- Two weeks of free post-launch support included on every project
- Senior Bubble lead on every account, no junior swaps
If that sounds like the way you want to work, we would be happy to take a look at what you are building. No slides, no pitch — a real conversation about your project.