Hey Everyone 
Vlad from Zeroqode here.
Such a friendly discussion going on, so I decided to swing in too!
While we appreciate the feedback and we acknowledge that thereâs room for improvement in quite a few things we are doing (and we are actively working on that), we have to strongly disagree with a few emotional statements here.
All their overpriced templates are copies of other apps and they want to go after one personâs that looks similar, when all their crap is just copies already
I am afraid that you missed the point here, unfortunately.
Itâs one thing if you get inspired by any application out there in the web (including any one of our templates), and go ahead and rebuild it yourself in your own way and style (just like you did with Trello).
Kudos to you and no problems at all with that (not from our side, at least).
But itâs pretty different if you purchase an existing template, copy the elements from within the existing pages (or the whole pages), or recreate them almost exactly as is (since you essentially have the source code), change the visuals and start reselling it as your IP.
We hope this was not the case here, and weâre glad that Sebastian @InstantStartUp here was very open and transparent with getting to the bottom of it, so itâs cool between us.
But just to give you an example of why we were concerned:
Imagine you getting one of those great Wordpress templates for 1/5 of what weâre charging, copying their source code to a new instance of the WP, changing the colors and the naming, and putting it back on the Marketplace under a different seller for a lower price.
Does that sound like good business to you? Well, It didnât sound like that to us either.
They are mostly just getting new bubblers to purchase their templates in hopes it will speed up their time but just causes them more headache (due to no documentation) then if they were to build it from scratch themselves
We are indeed getting a lot of people to give Bubble a chance and our Templates are a stepping stone and sometimes, the bootcamp for people reverse engineering and trying stuff out.
We disagree that our templates are not saving time (they do), but we agree that better documentation would help.
Weâre working on something really big here that we plan to announce to the community soon.
But we truly appreciate your inputs!
You can go to any site you want and once you know how the bubble system work you can copy almost any feature in a few days into your app by studying the app they are wanting to build. Like trello I completely cloned the whole site in like 4 days you donât need a template.
Thatâs the spirit!
In fact, we highly encourage not just taking our templates and launching them âas isâ, but actually tinkering with them, messing things up, failing, making more mistakes thus learning faster.
The template will always be there for you to start a new clean app from scratch once you failed enough times on your first (or tenth) attempt.
It very well may not be for everyone out there, and maybe for yourself it was more productive to do stuff without the template indeed. We appreciate and respect that.
However for the vast majority of people, it is efficient to see how certain visual elements, workflows, API integrations and their interconnection were already done by someone within a certain template or a flow.
They can either take them and tweak them a bit to pull it in the direction they want to go, or build something from scratch by taking all you see useful in the template elements, and putting your own unique parts on top.
Instant Startup has been accused of a lot of things on this thread without any real basis.
We respectfully disagree, but we are indeed happy about the way Sebastian handled the situation.
I built a couple apps for clients using AirDevâs canvas app. Is that against Bubbles policy?
Not until you make a copy of Canvas and start reselling it as your own product I guess. But I do see your point here.
And you can buy stuff for that app outside of Bubbleâs marketplace to use in client projects. Itâs a great system they have built but is that against Bubble policy too? Do they have special permissions because theyâve been here the longest?
Not sure we follow here, I donât think we ask for any special permissions.
All weâre saying is that according to current Bubble TOS you canât sell Bubble Templates outside of Bubble Marketplace. We didnât make those rules, and we certainly are not getting any special permissions here.
Makes sense?
All these templates look like other existing apps. Hardly original design that can be protected against duplication.
Exactly
But none of the other existings apps (like Udemy, in your example), were built on Bubble, right?
Meaning we didnât take the app source code, replicate it or make something really similar and put it our there for people to pay for (itâs not that we could have done that anyways, but just to make the point here).
I agree that you can never protect yourself completely from being replicated by someone (and in fact - in a lot of cases this is a great thing means you done at least something right!).
But here weâre emphasizing that there may have been a few not very fair shortcuts that were taken while the similar app was created, thatâs all.
I like the products Zeroquode brings to bubble but this investigating every person who isnât recognizable as an established figure and assuming they are a fraud before there is any evidence to indicate that is in fact reality is ridiculous.
Thanks mate!
But I believe thatâs an overstatement to say the least, donât you think so?
We hardly ever investigate anyone (or do we?) and assuming anyoneâs a fraud without very obvious concerns that we have openly stated here.
If we would indeed regularly harass people on the forum for exaggerated concerns, Iâd probably not even respond to that.
But usually itâs the other way around, and weâre not complaining .
Thanks guys, and do clone the heck out of our templates
Just play fair please, like hopefully Sebastian from @InstantStartUp does.
)
