Charging $10 a month or $100 at once for a plugin is robbery. That’s $140 for me for a single plugin or $14 a month. Ridiculous. Tough sell on $50 for a plugin let alone $100.
(yes there are more expensive plugin which also… I will not be wasting my money on. Its insane)
Then don’t, simple as that. If you feel as if the plugins are too expensive then simply don’t use them.
Its killing the plugin economy. So many plugins would earn 10 times more but just lowering their prices. It’s insanely overpriced to expect people to spend thousands on a few plugins.
Here’s the link to the documentation if your interested in building your own. The makers of the plugins work hard and provide great resources. There are also many free options in the plugin store.
I understand they work hard. I get that. But this is bubble. People are here for a fast, inexpensive way to build their idea or project. I get they work hard but with bubble you gotta understand we’re not all ballers who can splash hundreds if not thousands on an idea. I’m 17. I don’t have any income. I can spare maybe $50-$100 but not on 1 single plugin. I would love to use a specific plugin but for people (not just me) who aren’t financially able to support spending hundreds of dollars it’s a real blow to our app building. If I could afford these plugins I would 100% buy them but there needs to be an understanding that so many people are here building their apps with little to no funds. Simply providing the $14 a month to run my app is gonna be stressful for me. I guess everyones financial situation is different. It just sucks having all of these great plugins stuck behind a massive paywall.
I understand, but to be honest some of the plugins provided to us cost the plugin creators money for the license to use them. While it would be nice to have those great plugins for free, but I also understand that their hard work should be paid for. All I can say is that you can always attempt your hand at writing out the code for your own custom plugins. I wish there was more I could say.
hahaha “the plugin economy” …great phrase
I have built some really cool things (in my mind) without needing to pay for any plugin…there is one that I want to buy, it seems really worth the $100 for my use, however I am still going to attempt to build my own without using the plugin (mostly just to get more experience with bubble) but ultimately because I, like you have no real money to build what I am building…I just really don’t find a need to complain about the prices of things I want but can’t afford…that $250,000 Bentley is “Highway Robbery”, and that $10 toll that gets you only 3 miles of non congested roadway that saves you 1 hour a day, is most definitely Highway Robbery; but again I just don’t complain about it and use the free road that has the congestion and takes me the extra hour, because that is life…some things you want but you can’t afford
This.
Either a plugin is essential to your app. Like simply won’t work without it. In which case bake the plugin cost into your app pricing.
Or it just looks nice.
Or it just simplifies something you can yourself.
I dont want it to seem like im saying you shouldnt pay for plugins. 100% yes we should pay. But it’d be good if we could do something like say pay it overtime if it’s a 1 time payment even if bubble say pays the builder the full price and charges us over say 2-6 months or something. Kinda like afterpay. I know this idea isnt the best. I havent spent much time thinking about how itd work out so dont tear my head off. Some sort of payment plan feature would be nice though. Id be more than happy to pay the $100 over 4 or 5 months but i need to launch so i can earn money. My site is free to use and would make its money from ads so its not the most steady income. Some sort of support for people who dont earn a lot would be nice. Once again. Im not sure how it would work so please dont tear my head off. Im trying to be constructive.
Even this is incorrect. Building stuff on the web can, in fact, be completely free to you. But only with traditional tools. All the tools are free and there are plenty of ancillary services that have incredibly generous free tiers. Get your code on and get going.
Bubble – on the other hand – is actually kind of a premium product. It’s not a great value in terms of hosting, compute power, storage, etc. for money. But what you get (even in the free tier) is a really cool integrated environment that’s magically multi-user (even in free), has a no- / low-code programming interface (with more than its share of quirks and limitations, mind you) and makes a lot of the BS that goes into getting a site/app up and running just go away.
Bubble is about trading money for time. If you’re going to build an app on Bubble that you want or NEED to bootstrap, you’re going to have to figure out how to cover the small-ish costs. To take full advantage of Bubble and to learn every part of it, you do need to be on a paid plan (any paid plan, even the hobby one).
So how can you make $14 US a month? Wash a few cars, mow a few lawns, help a few befuddled oldsters learn to “use the computer”, work retail or food service a few more hours a week?
If you are sitting there saying, “Well, I don’t know how to find people near me that need their cars washed or their lawns mowed or need help with ‘the computer’, or how to get a part-time retail or food service job?”… Well, WTF do you think is going to happen if you get some snazzy app up and running that you want to charge money for? You think customers are just going to show up and give you money? It does not work that way.
I don’t know what paid plugins you want access to, but let me tell you that you are not missing much. There are very few that provide decent value for money. Many of them are just plain silly. Bubble is just getting to the level of sophistication and awareness and audience that might (let me re-emphasize “might”) make it worthwhile to offer plugins of any sophistication.
With a thing like Calendar Grid Pro, that’s a plugin that I was building for myself, anyway. But there’s a lot of experience and value locked up in there and releasing it as a paid plugin is a way to possibly defray some of the costs of my time investment in building GRUPZ.com.
So, you see, things like CGP are my version of mowing a few lawns, washing a few cars, etc.
And yeah, it costs money. It’s most of the logic that powers the most important parts of my commercial app. If you DM’ed me and said, “Oh hai man, I’d like to learn how how you built GRUPZ and how you do such-and-such with dates, or how does the calendar even display blocked dates (since there’s no easy way to iterate over things in Bubble)?.. Could I get some coaching and education from you?” I’d say, “Well, here’s the thing. It’d take me several hours to teach you all of that stuff. My consulting rate is over $100/hour. It’s, like, way more time and cost effective to just subscribe to Calendar Grid Pro unless you really have a burning need and desire to become a calendar nerd.”
That’s Software as a Service, right? It’s amazing value for money. And, anyway, I’ve documented most of what I know about the technical side of all of this here in the forums, so you can learn all of that cash-free, just by taking some time to read and apply what I’ve written.
YAP3 (Yet another Plugin Pricing Post)
I am assuming you are talking about the new calendar plugin. It was generating a lot of expectation and probably shocked some people with the price tag.
I’m not going into the debate about its worth and price. I haven’t tried it and I doubt I find a use for it anytime soon. I can see that a lot of hours have been put into it and it’s bloated with features for a calendar widget.
The developer is quite known for creating a business around rentals and that plugin seems cater the needs of those who rent. In other words…the needs of people who earn money with their homes.
Basically he built a performant featured calendar widget solution for people who already have a way to earn money. It’s not a plugin for CAD/MDT kids if you know what I mean.
Build something with Bubble that brings you money. If you need a calendar use the alternatives and work around their limitations as everyone else is doing and once you got enough money buy those plugins you think will avoid you having to spend time working around Bubble’s limitations. That is how these things work.
Cheers.
@lockymadera we all know it’s kind painful when you need/want something but can’t afford. Everyone has been there before.
But it’s not fair to say it’s a robbery especially if you’re not being forced to use it.
If you can’t afford consider it that it doesn’t even exist and move on. Think of it this way, if that plugin didn’t exist what will you do?
There are people that find value in these “pricey” plugins and have the money to pay for it.
I’m working on a premium plugin to be released soon. So for the many that showed interest I asked them how much they’re willing to pay.
On average I’m seeing about $120. See below for one such example. For these users such plugins presents a great value to their application and so are willing to pay a reasonable price for it.
On the other side…
Wait till OP realises that he can’t transfer the license from one app to another 
That is something @bubble needs to address ASAP.
That on it’s own is a no-no to buying third party plugins for me. That is why I stick with free and private ones. This lacking feature in the marketplace is hurting badly developers.
visibly distraught
Then there is also the this. Some plugins use paid licence libraries.
My Air Calendar Pro plugin will be using the FullCalendar scheduler.
If you were to even purchase the license yourself you will pay $480 for the SaaS license (note their definition of SaaS) to FullCalendar.
Now as a developer i have to pay for a special license, just to use this library, then spend hundreds of hours to create the plugin.
All plugins are not the same, its fair if one is saying that in general plugins here are expensive (most are around $30 one time). But to pick on one or two plugins and say its robbery is really demoralizing. Creating plugins involving dates/times is very challenging and I can understand the pain and hours @keith has gone through to create such a plugin.
What do you guys think will be a fair price to charge for such a plugin.
Actually, I’d say 100$ is the market econonomy behaving predictably. A product with low demand will cost more than a product in high demand. As of right now, Bubble’s plugin store is a low-demand marketplace. It’s unfortunate for the buyer. It’s unfortunate for the seller. It’s unfortunate for Bubble. But it’s reality.
Just like it’s reality that a couple of years ago, there was no plugin store. And a couple of years before that, there was no Bubble at all to allow you to create apps without programming experience.
Over time, as Bubble grows, it’ll change. Quality will improve. Prices will go down. The plugin store now is better than it was six months ago. In six more months it will be better than it is today. In twelve months we’ll all laugh heartily over a beer, and look back at the strange, immature plugin ecosystem of yesteryear.
But give it some faith and time.
I can only agree with @seanhoots et @petter . Yes that’s true that some plugin price may be hard to understand (and this is why I don’t buy them) while for some other, I would pay more for what they provide. This is the same thing on all market and plugin is not different. Sometimes, it’S hard to know how much a plugin really worth when you don’t create it and support it. And I agree that we might see some price drop in future with the growing user and also growing plugin catalog. IF there’s 2 nice calendar plugin, the price will not be the same if you can find 10 plugin of the same type.
It just doesn’t make sense for this single plugin. It’s in such high demand. A calendar like this is soooo useful to hundreds if not thousands of projects. It could easily make hundreds if not thousands a month at a price point like $20-$40
In your case, I would probably not offer one-time fee until you have a better grasp of how many people are going to use it.
I would say to start with 10$/month and monitor. You would need 5.71 customers to cover the cost of the license including also Bubble’s fee. Not including your taxes and your time to develop and support.
