Data-driven insights on the Bubble Template Marketplace

Entrepreneurship
1

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:

  • Any installs listed as “< 20” I rounded down to 0.

  • Any ratings that were null I rounded down to 0.

  • 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:

  • Highest Earning Template Categories

    • Marketplaces - $750k

    • Social - $375k

    • On-demand Services - $300k

    • Directory & Listings - $214k

  • Highest Install counts by category

    • Building blocks - 155k

    • Dashboard - 109k

    • Marketplace - 87k

    • Landing Page - 81k

    • Social - 64k

  • Paid Template Categories with both high avg install & high avg pricing

    • Marketplace (avg install 151, avg price 127)

    • Ondemand services (avg install 137, avg price 128)

    • Saas (avg install 156, avg price 115)

Analysis:

  • Ratings vs Installs by Category

    • 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.

    • 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.

    • Paid Landing Pages (134 at time of writing) have both the lowest avg rating and install counts.

  • Price point ceiling

    • ~$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.

    • 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.

    • Key take away, the higher you go, the more imperative it is to get reviews from those first 20 installs.

  • 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?

2 Likes
2

Very interesting insights. Thanks for sharing. :blush:

1 Like
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I haven’t looked at the template marketplace in quite a while, but two thoughts come to mind:

  • The template price * number of installs formula tends to vastly overstate the actual revenue generated by those templates (for a bunch of reasons - there are old forum posts on this)

  • I would guess the template marketplace will be less and less relevant going forward, given new users (who are the main buyers of templates) will likely be using the AI Agent to generate v1’s of their app

I think you did the right thing by examining the market before committing to developing any templates. But I’m not convinced it’s going to be a big growth area going forward.

1 Like
4

If you have the time, creating clones of existing apps and running Google ads, works great. They do require a lot of maintenance.

We find it better to manage plugins.

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5

As long as we do not have access to the source code, AI won’t be good enough.

6

Thanks for sharing! My responses below:

  1. On template price * number of installs, 100% agree, though I think for analytical purposes it’s valuable to know that one category outperforms another category by a factor of X, etc.
  2. My contrarian bet with AI in general is that for more complicated apps with more moving parts, a high-quality template that’s tested and optimized will have value as a starting point for new users/builders, who can then use AI to make their custom tweaks etc in specific parts of the template. Whereas the dashboard category of the template marketplace, yeah I think that’s gone.

Whether or not it’s a big growth area going forward is still up in the air. I think it’s really saturated in most categories, so even without AI agents, I don’t know that I am seeing compelling opportunity areas.

7

Template marketplace no longer promoted by bubble, so it’s been a dying revenue stream for past year…coincides with their push of AI builder that can produce a wireframe. Even if your templates are complete apps, you’ll need to do the marketing yourself to get sales as bubble doesn’t anymore. Problem is you get no control of sale or customer so you’ll never get good enough metrics to know how your efforts pay off, nor opportunities to upsell and cross sell since the customer is bubbles and not yours.

If you want to waste time, go for it and simply look online at most popular app type of 2026…hint, they are same as in 2025, 2024 and back.

But, overall AI makes app building cheap, so templates offer less value. Soon enough, on bubble, apps initial build will be free, and only revenue for developers will be ongoing maintenance and management, unless you have some skill beyond just building an app that is in demand and you can demonstrate yourself as an expert in.

Niche yourself, create free simple templates as content, leverage the development of them as more content, market yourself, not the template, control the customer as yours and not bubbles.

1 Like
8

hey @boston85719 Thanks for the detailed response.

Just to play devils advocate here.

Template value is tied to the time it takes to create an app at a similar or comparable level. What if in the future a template’s value is tied to the tokens needed to create that same app?

Using AI to create an app today is definitely not cheap, it’s just currently subsidized for the rest us by that sweet sweet VC cash. Sure, Bubble is jumping on the AI bandwagon and need to show they can AI too, but sooner or later the economics of it all will hit them too.

The tokens it takes to create 1000 marketplace apps from scratch will always be multiples more than 1000 apps starting from a marketplace template then AI helps you customize it to your app-specific needs.

For Bubble’s bottom line, I see a clear value in a robust template ecosystem to offset and optimize duplicated token spend. Do I think that Bubble sees this right now? Probably not. They’re busy playing catch up with v0 and lovable. But I think there’s alot of assumptions being made about the future of AI and software that’s focused solely on a given model’s capabilities and benchmarks, and not really the underlying financials or economics of it all.

The irony of it is that we all lived through the 2010s when Airbnb was always cheaper than a hotel, and Uber’s were always cheaper than taxis, and people proclaimed “hotels are dead” or “taxies are cooked”. And it was really convincing at the time. But we later found out we didn’t realize it was all subsidized by VC money. It’s 2026 and Ubers are expensive, Airbnbs cost more than ever, and hotels still exist, taxis still exist.

9

You can look at anything I’ve said about AI in this forum over the past year and see I know this already myself, so I agree with you, that the cost of AI will increase in the future.

But your concept of template value tied to the time it takes to create an app at a similar or comparable level is not 100% on point. I’ve got the type of templates you’ve isolated as the ones to build, that I published in 2020. These are around $350, and a comparable app built from scratch would take 80-120 hours to build. The cost I can charge for them is not tied to the actual comparable value, because for one, the maximum we are allowed by Bubble to charge is $500. AND that $500 has not increased in the past 6 years….if it kept with inflation it would have risen to around $625 today, but Bubble has not listened to any rational input from template builders that they should lift this artificial cap and allow us to price our own products for what they are actually worth, since that will improve the marketplace and incentivize template builders to build better templates.

BTW, I didn’t say that the soon the initial build on bubble will be free by implying that AI will make it so cheap that it will be free because of AI. Instead, this is based on understanding how the market is moving. AI is making developers faster, so they can build more faster, which means less cost. AND, the bubble ecosystem has evolved over the past 8 years that most experienced professional developers have had the same experiences, which is most of the time, if you are actually good and deliver real value to your clients, they do not just want you for an initial build, they want you as a CTO type. Most engagements become longer term, not necessarily full time, but longer term. Most agency owners have the same experience as most good freelancers, which is the client will keep coming back for some iterations, new feature builds and possibly even bug fixes, user error investigations and roadmap brainstorming.

So knowing all of that, I see the market as moving toward a competitive environment where initial builds are cheap or free, with intention of having that client on a longer term engagement for all the other stuff that goes with launching and operating a startup as solo founder.

But despite all of that, my insights are still true that Bubble no longer promotes the template marketplace, and likely never will again, after so much investment into AI they will constantly push that. Previously the template marketplace was a great leverage for Bubble to get a new user into a paid subscription faster, now that is AI for them, and because of the LTV of a new user turned subscriber is likely always going to be lower than the token cost of an AI generated first build, they will consistently promote that over templates in the marketplace. My overall point, was that if you are going to dip your toes into it, be prepared to market them yourself, and do so knowing that you do not reap all the benefits of that marketing since the customer is bubbles and not yours. So maybe, just be creative, find a way to leverage the template marketplace for the bit of exposure you may get from it, while leveraging your own marketing efforts toward an approach where you own the customer…after all templates are just bubble apps, with the idea that once a user buys it, they can create more than one app from it, which is kind of just like using the clone app functionality available to every single bubble app :light_bulb:

1 Like
10

Appreciate the perspective. :ok_hand:

11

They don’t even create or market their own official Components anymore, it’s just a small little button with “templates” that haven’t been updated in years (this is despite the fact that they are higher quality than what the AI editor can currently create). Boston is correct on this.