Bubble

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Build the application I actually need instead of Bubble — and be honest about who is building it.

**If the person building is not a developer, keep paying.** That is the whole product and no amount of good code replaces it. If you are a developer, you are paying platform prices and workload fees for something you could write, and you are inside a runtime you cannot debug properly.

STACK
- Node 20+ with Fastify, server-rendered HTML with a little vanilla JS
- SQLite through better-sqlite3, WAL mode
- No client-side framework
- Caddy in front

BEFORE ANYTHING, GET THE DATA OUT
- Export every table before you plan a migration, and look at what actually comes out: the fields, the relationships, the files. Relationships are the ones that arrive flattened
- The application logic does not export. It is drawn, and redrawing it as code is the work — budget for that rather than for the data

THE SHAPE
- Real tables with real columns and real constraints, created by migrations. Types, required fields, uniqueness and foreign keys enforced by the database rather than by the interface
- Four screen kinds cover almost everything: a list with filters, a detail, a form, and a named action with a confirmation
- Each screen is a file. Adding one is a small pull request, which is a review as well as a change

THE PART A VISUAL BUILDER HIDES AND YOU MUST NOT
- **Authorisation on the server, for every screen and every query, default deny.** A drawn application often checks permissions by hiding a button, and a hidden button is not a permission. This is the single most common security failure in applications built this way, and the migration is the moment to fix it rather than reproduce it
- Row-level scope as a predicate joined into the query, never a filter applied afterwards
- A statement timeout and a row cap on every list

WHAT YOU GAIN THAT IS WORTH SAYING
- No workload units. The cost model of these platforms is the thing people leave over, and a small server has a fixed price whatever the traffic does
- Real logs, real errors, a debugger, and the ability to write a test
- Version control, so a change can be reviewed and reverted

WHAT YOU LOSE
- Speed to the next feature, if the person adding it is not a developer. Say that out loud before starting, because it is the trade and it is permanent

WHAT MATTERS MOST
Server-side authorisation and real constraints. Everything a visual builder does easily, it does by trusting the interface — and this is the chance to stop doing that.