Bubble Agency vs Freelancer: How to Choose (2026 Guide)

Agency vs Freelancer: Quick Comparison

Below is a quick comparison to help you decide what’s right for your project.

Understanding Your Options

What Is a Bubble Agency?

A Bubble agency is a team of specialists (developers, designers, project managers, and sometimes product strategists) who build apps on Bubble as their full-time job.

They’ve shipped dozens (often hundreds) of production apps, and they treat your project like a product, not just a gig.

Because they work together daily, they have systems in place:

• Designers focus on user flow and interface, not just making things look pretty, but ensuring the app actually works well.

• Developers structure databases correctly from day one, avoid performance traps, and write maintainable workflows.

• Project managers keep timelines realistic, communicate clearly, and prevent scope creep.

You’re also getting institutional knowledge. If your app needs Stripe subscriptions, role-based dashboards, or complex search, they’ve done it before and know the pitfalls to avoid.

Yes, agencies cost more than freelancers. But you’re paying for reliability, not just hours.

What Is a Freelance Bubble Developer?

A freelance Bubble developer is one person handling everything: requirements, design, development, testing, and client communication, often while juggling multiple clients.

Some freelancers are highly skilled senior builders with deep Bubble expertise. Others are beginners who’ve completed a tutorial and are charging $20/hour.

The appeal is obvious: lower upfront cost, direct communication, and potentially faster decisions. But the trade-offs are real:

• You manage the project. If deadlines slip or scope balloons, it’s on you to course-correct.

• No backup plan. If the freelancer gets sick, takes another job, or hits a technical wall, your project stalls, sometimes for weeks.

• Quality varies wildly. A polished demo doesn’t guarantee clean database structure or scalable workflows. And there’s no internal review process. What you get is what they ship.

Freelancers can deliver great results. But vetting them is entirely on you and if it goes wrong, the cost of fixing a broken app often far exceeds the initial savings.

Cost Comparison: What You Actually Pay

Cost is usually the first consideration, and the price difference between agencies and freelancers can be substantial. But the headline numbers do not tell the whole story.

Freelancer Costs

Freelance Bubble developers typically charge:

• Offshore/lower-cost regions: $15-40/hour

• Mid-level freelancers: $40-75/hour

• Senior freelancers: $75-150/hour

• Vetted platforms (Toptal, etc.): $100-200/hour

For a typical MVP with moderate complexity, freelancer costs might range from $5,000 for an offshore developer to $25,000 for a senior specialist. Complex applications can reach $40,000-60,000 even with freelancers.

However, there are often hidden costs with freelancers:

• Design: Many Bubble developers do not design. You may need to hire a separate designer, adding $2,000-10,000 or more.

• Project management: Your time managing the project has real cost, even if you do not account for it directly.

• Revisions and fixes: Quality issues often require additional paid work to resolve.

• Handoff complexity: If a freelancer becomes unavailable, onboarding a replacement costs time and money.

Agency Costs

Bubble agencies typically charge:

• Project-based pricing: $15,000-100,000+ depending on scope

• Effective hourly rates: $100-200/hour when calculated from project pricing

• Retainer arrangements: $3,000-15,000/month for ongoing support

Agency pricing includes overhead that freelancers do not carry: office space, employee benefits, business development, legal, accounting, and the management infrastructure that coordinates multiple team members. This overhead is real and necessary for agencies to operate sustainably.

The key difference is what is included. Agency pricing typically covers:

• Design: UI/UX design is usually part of the engagement.

• Project management: A dedicated person manages communication, scope, and timelines.

• Quality assurance: Internal review processes catch issues before delivery.

• Documentation: Handoff documentation for future maintenance.

• Multiple specialists: Designers, developers, and sometimes product strategists working together.

The real comparison: When you account for all the pieces required to deliver a quality product, the gap between agency and freelancer costs often narrows.

A $15,000 agency project might be comparable to a $8,000 freelancer plus $4,000 designer plus 40 hours of your time managing the project. The agency is still more expensive, but the difference is less dramatic than headline rates suggest.

Quality and Reliability

Quality variance is one of the most significant differences between agencies and freelancers.

Freelancer Quality Variance

The freelance market has no consistent quality floor. Some freelancers are excellent developers who could work at any top agency. Others are learning on client projects, have poor development practices, or simply lack the experience to build production-grade applications.

The platforms where freelancers are found (Upwork, Fiverr, Bubble's marketplace) do minimal vetting. Certifications test knowledge, not judgement or execution quality. Reviews can be gamed or reflect simple projects that do not stress a developer's capabilities.

This means the burden of quality assurance falls on you. If you cannot evaluate Bubble code quality yourself, you are essentially gambling on whether your freelancer will deliver something maintainable.

Common quality issues with inexperienced freelancers include:

• Poor database architecture. Data structures that work for 100 users but break at 10,000.

• Performance problems. Pages that load slowly, searches that time out, workflows that fail at scale.

• No error handling. Applications that crash mysteriously when unexpected conditions occur.

• Unmaintainable builds. Complex logic that nobody, including the original developer, can understand or modify.

• Security gaps. Privacy rules that expose data that should be protected.

Agency Quality Standards

Agencies have internal quality standards enforced through process and review. Work is typically reviewed by senior developers before delivery. Agencies have reputations to protect and long-term client relationships that incentivise quality.

This does not mean all agencies are excellent. Quality varies between agencies just as it varies between freelancers. But agencies have structural incentives and processes that create a higher quality floor than the freelance market.

A good agency provides:

• Architecture review. A senior Bubble developer reviews workflows, data structure, privacy rules, and performance before handoff.

• Testing. Functionality is tested before handoff.

• Standards. Consistent patterns for database design, workflows, and performance.

• Documentation. Clear records of what was built and why.

• Accountability. A business relationship that continues beyond individual projects.

Risk and Continuity

What happens when something goes wrong? What happens when you need changes six months after launch? These questions reveal important differences between agencies and freelancers.

The Freelancer Single Point of Failure

When you hire a freelancer, your entire project depends on one person. If that person gets sick, takes another project, becomes unresponsive, or simply disappears, your project is stuck.

This is not hypothetical. It happens regularly. Freelancers get burned out. They take full-time jobs. They over-commit and cannot deliver. They have personal crises. Any of these can leave you with an incomplete project and no clear path forward.

Finding a replacement freelancer is not simple. The new person must understand what the previous developer built, which is often poorly documented. They must work within existing architecture decisions, which may not match their preferred approach. The transition takes time and money, and the result is often compromise.

We see this regularly. Clients come to us with half-finished projects from previous freelancers who became unavailable. The handoff is painful. Sometimes the existing work is salvageable. Sometimes it needs to be rebuilt.

Agency Continuity

Agencies provide team redundancy. If one developer is unavailable, another can take over. The agency maintains documentation and institutional knowledge that survives individual personnel changes.

This is why agencies can offer structured support agreements. They can commit to ongoing availability because they are not dependent on any single person. When you need changes six months after launch, the agency is still there with context on your project.

The business relationship with an agency is also more durable. Agencies have formal contracts, established communication channels, and a business interest in maintaining client relationships. Freelancers, by contrast, often have informal arrangements that are easier for either party to abandon.

Communication and Project Management

Managing Freelancers

When you hire a freelancer, you become the project manager. You are responsible for:

• Defining requirements. Translating your business needs into specifications the developer can build from.

• Managing timelines. Tracking progress, identifying delays, adjusting schedules.

• Reviewing work. Checking deliverables against requirements and quality standards.

• Coordinating resources. Managing multiple freelancers if you need design, development, and other skills.

• Handling problems. Resolving scope disputes, quality issues, and communication breakdowns.

If you have project management experience and available time, this can work well. You maintain direct control over the project and can adjust quickly as needs change.

If you lack project management experience or time, managing freelancers becomes a significant burden. Many founders underestimate how much time it takes to manage a development project effectively.

Agency Project Management

Agencies include project management in their service. A dedicated person (or people) handles:

• Requirements gathering. Structured discovery processes to understand and document what you need.

• Timeline management. Realistic scheduling based on experience with similar projects.

• Communication. Regular updates, progress reports, and proactive problem flagging.

• Coordination. Managing designers, developers, and other specialists internally.

• Quality control. Ensuring deliverables meet standards before presenting to you.

This frees you to focus on your business while the agency handles execution. You still need to provide input, make decisions, and review work, but the management overhead is significantly reduced.

When to Hire a Freelancer

Freelancers make sense in specific situations:

Small, well-defined projects. If you need a specific feature added, a bug fixed, or a simple tool built, a skilled freelancer can deliver efficiently without agency overhead. Projects under $10,000 with clear requirements are often good freelancer fits.

Tight budget constraints. If your budget simply cannot accommodate agency pricing, a freelancer may be your only option. This is a legitimate constraint, particularly for early-stage startups testing ideas. Just go in with realistic expectations about quality and timeline risk.

You can evaluate technical work. If you or someone on your team can assess Bubble development quality, the freelancer quality variance becomes less risky. You can identify problems early and ensure standards are met.

You have project management capacity. If you can dedicate time to managing the project, providing clear requirements, and reviewing work regularly, the management overhead is not a problem.

Speed and flexibility matter most. Freelancers can sometimes start immediately and may have more flexible schedules than agencies with formal processes. If you need something built this week, a freelancer might be available when an agency is not.

When to Hire a Bubble Agency

Agencies make sense when:

The project is complex. Multi-user applications, integrations with external systems, complex business logic, and scale requirements all benefit from the depth of experience and team coordination agencies provide.

Reliability is critical. If project failure or significant delay has serious business consequences, the accountability and redundancy of an agency reduces risk. When the stakes are high, agency process and backup become worth the premium.

You need more than development. If you need design, product strategy, or technical guidance alongside development, an agency can provide these as a coordinated service. Assembling equivalent expertise from multiple freelancers is possible but harder to coordinate.

Long-term support matters. If you know you will need ongoing changes, maintenance, and support after launch, an agency relationship provides better continuity than hoping your freelancer remains available and interested.

You cannot evaluate technical quality. If nobody on your team can assess Bubble development work, agency internal review processes provide quality assurance you cannot provide yourself.

Your time is limited. If you cannot dedicate significant time to project management, the management infrastructure an agency provides becomes essential, not optional.

Real Examples: What Good Agency Work Looks Like

To illustrate the difference between agency and freelancer outcomes, here are examples from our work at Goodspeed:

Dwellr: Rescuing a Stalled Project

Dwellr is a VC-backed startup building a marketplace to connect families with senior care communities, cutting out outdated referral services and cold calls.

They came to us after a previous agency told them key features “couldn’t be built in Bubble.” The project was stuck. Launch was delayed.

We rebuilt trust by shipping fast. In 2 months, we delivered 15+ new features, including:

• A simplified onboarding flow for non-tech-savvy seniors and their families

• Direct messaging between users (no more phone tag)

• Admin-assisted listing creation so support staff could help users publish listings

The platform went live, and user engagement doubled.

"With the prior agency, we were told we couldn't do things. Goodspeed said yes to literally everything and delivered them in a quick fashion." — Davey Owens, CEO, Dwellr

This example illustrates a common pattern: projects that stall with one team because of technical limitations or management problems, then succeed with a more capable team. The difference is not just skill; it is process, problem-solving approach, and accountability.

SummerMatch: Building to Acquisition

SummerMatch helps high school students discover personalized summer programs (internships, service projects, pre-college courses) through a conversational AI interface.

The founding team needed more than a developer; they needed a product partner.

We co-designed the core experience: a guided flow that helps teens articulate their goals, paired with a recommendation engine that matches them to real opportunities. We built the backend logic, frontend UX, and scalable architecture, all in Bubble.

The result? Over 20,000 visits, strong user retention, and a product so compelling that College MatchPoint (SummerMatch’s parent company) was acquired by Guidewell. Our build became the foundation for post-acquisition scaling, including multi-brand support, lead tracking, and automated email segmentation.

This shows what agency partnership looks like when it works well: contributing not just development, but product thinking and execution quality that supports business outcomes including, in this case, an acquisition.

MyAskAI: Optimising for Scale

MyAskAI lets businesses deploy AI knowledge assistants in minutes. But as they grew, their Bubble app became slow and expensive, burning through workload units due to inefficient workflows and unoptimized queries.

They didn’t need a rebuild. They needed precision surgery.

In 3 weeks, we:

• Audited 500+ code references

• Optimized frontend interactions on critical pages

• Redesigned backend API calls with intelligent caching and leaner queries

Result: 30% reduction in CPU consumption, faster load times, and significantly lower operational costs without changing the user experience.

"It was the best project management service I've experienced working with third-party developers or agencies." — Alex Rainey, CEO, MyAskAI

Freelancers rarely take on this kind of rescue work. It requires deep Bubble expertise, performance diagnostics, and disciplined QA, exactly what a battle-tested agency provides.

Read more Bubble case studies from our client work.

How to Evaluate a Bubble Agency

If you decide an agency is right for your project, here is what to look for:

Relevant portfolio. Ask to see projects similar to yours. If you are building a marketplace, look for marketplace experience. If you need complex integrations, ask about integration projects. Generic portfolios are less meaningful than specific relevant experience.

Client references. Speak with previous clients. Ask about communication, timeline adherence, quality, and what happened after launch. Agencies should be willing to connect you with references.

Bubble partnership status. Bubble offers partnership tiers (Gold, Silver) based on project volume and quality. Partnership status provides some validation of capability, though it is not the only factor.

Process and communication. Ask how the agency works. What does discovery look like? How often will you receive updates? How do they handle change requests? Clear, established processes suggest maturity and reliability.

Pricing transparency. Good agencies explain their pricing clearly. Be cautious of agencies that cannot provide ballpark estimates or whose pricing seems disconnected from scope.

Post-launch support. Ask what happens after the project launches. Do they offer maintenance retainers? What is their response time for issues? Long-term support capability matters more than most clients initially realise.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Choosing based on lowest price alone. The cheapest option is rarely the best value. Low prices often reflect limited experience, insufficient time allocation, or corners that will be cut. Budget matters, but optimising purely for lowest cost frequently leads to expensive problems later.

Underestimating project complexity. Simple-sounding applications often have hidden complexity. User authentication, payment processing, admin interfaces, and edge cases add up. If multiple freelancers or agencies give higher estimates than you expected, your expectations may be miscalibrated, not their pricing.

Skipping the discovery phase. Jumping straight to development without proper requirements definition leads to scope creep, misaligned expectations, and rework. Pay for discovery, whether with an agency or separately, before committing to a full build.

Ignoring post-launch needs. Every application needs maintenance, bug fixes, and improvements after launch. Plan for this upfront. Choosing a development partner without considering ongoing support is short-sighted.

Not checking references. Speaking with previous clients takes time but prevents expensive mistakes. Agencies and freelancers should provide references. If they cannot or will not, consider that a red flag.