Cross post from bubble subreddit
I am considering create some Bubble templates but found it hard to assess where the demand is and where to start. I figured I should probably gain a deep understanding first of the market itself, so I scraped the Bubble Template marketplace and made a nice little excel sheet of 1600+ templates with their price, ratings, install count, and category, then threw it all into Tableau.
Heres what I found.
Notes on Methodology:
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Any installs listed as “< 20” I rounded down to 0.
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Any ratings that were null I rounded down to 0.
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For pricing, I use the last listed price. So for revenue estimates etc, if a template had it’s first 100 installs at $50, but only the last 50 at $100, I calculate it as 150 installs at $100. Not really the most accurate way to go about it, but I’m working with what’s available.
Stats:
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Highest Earning Template Categories
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Marketplaces - $750k
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Social - $375k
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On-demand Services - $300k
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Directory & Listings - $214k
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Highest Install counts by category
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Building blocks - 155k
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Dashboard - 109k
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Marketplace - 87k
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Landing Page - 81k
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Social - 64k
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Paid Template Categories with both high avg install & high avg pricing
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Marketplace (avg install 151, avg price 127)
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Ondemand services (avg install 137, avg price 128)
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Saas (avg install 156, avg price 115)
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Analysis:
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Ratings vs Installs by Category
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Paid Marketplace templates (87 at time of writing) have the highest installs (+4k) but average a rating of 3. This is probably because building an Uber clone or an Etsy clone is complex, which means there is naturally more that the template can get wrong. Bubble as a platform is especially well suited to create these types of applications, which I think makes this insight all the more interesting.
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Paid AI templates (67 at time of writing) have the highest avg. rating of 4.25 but less overall installs when compared to Paid Marketplace templates. This makes sense from the perspective that AI templates typically have less moving parts and complexity (i.e. chat interface + connector to AI provider) and the age of the average AI template is going to be alot younger than their marketplace counterparts.
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Paid Landing Pages (134 at time of writing) have both the lowest avg rating and install counts.
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Price point ceiling
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~$250 is the highest you can go with zero reviews but >20 installs, although the templates at this price point are from established players, which I suspect factors into this. I think the real number for new template makers is much lower.
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Above this point, the data shows all templates with positive install counts also have reviews. Below this point, the data shows that you can get more installs with no reviews the more you go towards $0.
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Key take away, the higher you go, the more imperative it is to get reviews from those first 20 installs.
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One-hit Wonders
- There are a handful of template makers with only one paid template that has considerable install counts. I’d like to dive more into this when I get a chance, but I suspect that they create deep templates with domain specific expertise in categories or spaces saturated with alot of generic or reskinning templates.
Overall, my key take way is to stay away from creating a “Uber clone” type template and instead focus on a specific niche in the Saas or Ondemand services categories with lots of generic templates that have mid-level ratings.
If you’re a template maker on bubble, does this line up with your view of the market currently? Is there something critical that the data would miss?
