Larger agencies are "ripping" people's ideas without giving credit

Thanks @jonah.deleseleuc for taking the time to write this post. I totally agree with you and I believe everyone should be aware of such non-ethical practices.

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That is terrible and inexcusable. And this is true even if they made ZERO.

I am not into plugins, but it is difficult for me to believe that any plugin has made anywhere near $50,000 on Bubble. Without firsthand knowledge, it appears to me that most plugins are unnecessary (just replace a basic API call or JS) and only attract a large audience of free users who refuse to pay.

Given everything we know about Bubble, their misleading and inaccurate stats, obscuring any true numbers, and constantly going to bat for Gold agencies (e.g., RFP stuff)
I’ll bet the house, despite the images below, that RapidDev’s plugin does not have 1,000 active paid installed apps users.

Consider this: despite supposedly 50k of revenue for a fairly simple plugin, there’s

  • One page of documentation (<150 words).
  • No version releases.
  • TWO! reviews, both within one month of release.

I assume it was either free at one point or they simply installed it on a slew of free apps or whatever they worked on, but I can not imagine they made $50,000 in actual revenue.

And I do not blame RD for manipulating install numbers (though I do blame them for blatantly copying your plugin code), but Bubble is to blame for once again prioritizing certain agencies over millions of their users and punishing great plugin developers who can not sell their plugins due to all the fake noise out there…


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You raise some great points. Yes, those are obviously reviews made by friends or colleagues of the creator of the plugin.

I would greatly appreciate if plugins forked from your own plugin would be included in the plugin description. For example, there was an abandoned card validator plugin that I forked. In the description (even though the plugin is abandoned) I included this:

Better Card Validator by Vision Code. Fork of Credit Card Validator by No Code Co. This will be a maintained version of the original plugin.

I don’t think concerns like these are a priority with bubble at the moment. To anyone over at bubble reading this, I’d be glad to help consult and share my experience publishing plugins on the marketplace.

Cheers

They definitely have. Some plugins will have made well over 100k. Techblocks charts comes to mind as one.

I dream of the day the plug-in search area in the editor is filtered by a combination of relevance and reviews, not installs. A certain large plug-in developer would hate that.

As a rule of thumb, if there are two identical plugins, one by a large agency with lots of installs, and one smaller one by an independent dev, the independent dev one is better as it was made to fix all of the shortcomings of the more popular one.

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True but thats not just a plugin (like a cutesy little tool) that a robust tool…

It’s an imported library… Really not too hard to do the same thing

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Regardless of how easy it was to build there are a TON of plugins that have done over $50k in the store. Your feelings or disbelief about it doesn’t change the data…in no code because so many users don’t know even basics of JS the simplest plugins can be very helpful to them.

You can use the bubble plug-in api or a chrome based web scraper to download and audit all the plugins…and get estimated revenue.

I do agree with you that many plugins are extremely profitable. I think this is besides the overall point, since plagiarism is still plagiarism.

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If you know for a fact that tons of plugins have made over 50k, then I certainly believe you.

However, I am very, very skeptical that this particular Pluggin made 50k.

If this plugin, in fact, doesn’t have over 1k PAID installs, then the numbers in the plugin marketplace are innacurate, and many plugins that present as making a decent amount may in fact not be…

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100% it’s sus af :sweat_smile: it almost looks like they just created 1000 apps and installed it on 1000 apps :skull:

It actually was the last whiteboard plugin to be published, many months behind any others, even the free ones that been out longer don’t come near 1000.

I’d believe it a bit more if bubble allowed us to email our plugin installers or market toward them or something but they don’t. Rapid dev has 7 fb followers, not much of a LinkedIn following, no Facebook ads or Google ads I could find running for the whole company, their clutch profile has 54 reviews so that’s something but all around it points me to believe they aren’t really marketing strongly either let alone marketing that specific plug-in strong enough to have the numbers it has.

Also it kind of defies the concept most other plugins have where free options are used far more then the paid onesšŸ˜… all things considered it’s hard to believe those numbers aren’t fabricated.

Here’s something which needs to be fixed asap:

If you purchase a template, export the code, and reimport it into bubble under a new app, it removes the fact it was originally created from a template and can be immediately re-uploaded to the bubble marketplace because it is technically a new app and not a template.

Hey all, as you know I’m still new around the block but making my way through our forums content.

I came across this and flagged it to the team for internal review. Thanks for sharing @jonah.deleseleuc

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This is to prevent people from taking other templates and just copying them into their own :wink:

Could you also ask them about putting in a stated refund policy for templates? Would be great to make it so that people no longer have as much time as they please to copy and paste all template components into another app before requesting a refund (which Bubble just provides automatically now).

Something simple like no refunds after 3 days would work great, since ALL apps already are REQUIRED to provide demonstration login credentials for potential purchasers to audit the templates functionality before they purchase to ensure it meets their needs.

This will also serve as a small assurance that Bubble has some intention of protecting our IP.

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Thanks for reading:)

I’d recommend reaching out to the Rapid Dev team as well. They are good people, and I’m sure they would be happy to clear things up.

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Nope. Only if its a exact copy. Else no attribution is needed with MIT

Strange to make a post like this before contacting the agency…

Also a MIT licence doesn’t require contacting the original founder or giving attribution.

You need to self host part of the code using a diffence or commercial licence. If you dont want people to copy your code.

Would be great if Bubble allowed us to select what licence we used for free plugins.

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https://opensource.org/license/mit

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

ISC license does not require attribution.

Of course this is for code used verbatim

Do I owe them anything? Did you read the post?

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