You select 3 paid plugins and you pay more than for a bubble subscription.
It’s ridiculous if you compare what bubble provides and what these 3 plugins provide.
I know that it’s your time, you put the price and the market will decide if they are worth it or not. But if you don’t rethink pricing I believe someone will step in and just provide cheaper alternatives which in turn will flood marketplace with plugins that do exactly the same.
I prefer quality over quantity and I’m fine with paying for plugins, just not at those prices.
I agree. Charging for its time is fair, but it’s often too much
Fortunately some people like @seanhoots provide very good plugins for free. Thanks to him and others who help the community
stop your wining…most of the plugin builders provide fee assets… i don’t see too many reviews on those.
You have a choice …or maybe not…maybe these plugins fill a gap in Bubble platform which makes them a prerequisite… then the devs who provide these should charge for them…lets face it we are all (i’m sure most of us) are trying to make a living.
devs keep up the development of these are all are responsive to help and support.
So, what would be a good price for a plugin? Based on what? I’m asking, because I’m about to release some, but I need to pay my bills at the end of the day.
Depends on the pain it relieves and on your internal costs.
How many hours did it take? Are you a professional developer and you already knew how to code or are you including self-learning within those hours? What is your overhead? What is the cost of living for you?
So many factors to include. But be wise with the price.
Do you prefer that your plugin is used by 10 people paying 1$ a month or do you prefer 1 person paying 10$/month. If you piss of a single customer…where will you lose more? Do you prefer 3 reviews coming out of 10 clients or 0 reviews coming from 1 client.
On the contrary, how much time goes into supporting the plugin for 10 clients vs 1. Support costs will add up for you also.
I may be wrong, but I don’t think he is targeting plugin developers directly. While all plugins, especially those that are developed for free, are greatly appreciated - from a bubble customer point of view, costs can soar out-of-control, especially if all plugins have to be paid for eventually.
Think this is a concern between bubble and their customers rather than with those developing plugins for money.
In general I agree with all this, unfortunately - because of Stripe requirement to sell in the Marketplace - one needs to have a real company. That in most of the countries means:
taxes
social charges
company bills: phone, electricity, office (or home, but you still need to pay it), bank account (in some countries - no free bank accounts for companies!), accountant (!) unless you can do it yourself… that means some time and knowledge
Then regarding plugins:
bubble/stripe charges
creation time
support time
We did not reach profit yet!
So if it’s a side business doing plugins - ok, one can sell them for peanuts or even offer for free. Otherwise, unfortunately, it’s getting crazy. I counted - would need to earn min. 200EUR/month just to cover the business costs and still working somewhere else to pay living… 2200EUR/month + taxes + social charges (so 3-3,5kEUR total) if I wanted it to be my main income.
Can I sell my plugins for 1EUR - yes, but are we there yet with the number of possible users?
But you are right with this: “but are we there yet with the number of possible users?”
This is a problem. But even so…you will need a base of users for reputation once bubble hits mainstream(which it will). Whoever is positioned there with a great reputation will take the $$$.
Check @seanhoots as an example. He provides really great free (but premium) plugins and charges a reasonable price for others.
Correction: He know offers ALL his plugins(up to this date) for free. Hope he still continues developing new ones and charging for them when he sees fit
isn’t the Bubble team pushing for subscription models? This can be tricky because a lot of subscriptions are around $5 - $10 which I think is too much for most if not all plugins.
I know this is not debated here, but I’d much rather move away from paying for plugins and rather pay the developer. There are a lot of really good free plugins available and I really wouldn’t mind contributing something to their efforts.
I’d definitely welcome a Patreon type model where I subscribe to a developer with a ‘voluntary’ monthly fee. This is an incentive for the developer to keep developing and fixing plugins and I think will greatly improve the overall quality of the plugins available.
The downside is of course that most users are not familiar, or do not want to get familiar, with with developer behind the plugin. It would require a redesign of the plugin store that puts more emphasis on the developer user and the library of plugins he/she maintains.
I don’t know about that. You can easily find yourself having to pay several developers on top of your Bubble subscription, lol. I’d rather just pay Bubble every month and have access to all plugins, or a package deal that gives you access to so-many plugins that the package deal allows. But saying that, that’s only if all plugins eventually require payment to use.
And I would love to see bubble integrating also PayPal for entering selling @ Marketplace. Like that - could cut the costs of having a company (at least in the first stage) and sell plugins for 1$ as the hobbyist
I think in the end the market will sort itself out. If a plugin is too expensive, no one will buy it or a cheaper version will come along eventually.
I like the Patreon model because it allows me to fund developers that put out plugins (a lot of free ones too) for all of their work involving Bubble, not just this one plugin. It will allow users to have some leverage over types of plugins or additional features to add to their existing portfolio and a different stream of revenue.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great idea and those developers should be rewarded. But purely just from a customer-bubble point of view, I would have thought that would have been down to bubble to employ developers to make plugins - then those costs incurred in their subscription costs, or however they see fit. I know Bubble’s circumstances at the moment may not be suitable for that, but I wouldn’t have a clue what to pay individual developers for their plugins. Then there’s those who may take advantage of that… but never mind. All is good, lol
I think I disagree. it’s Bubble’s job to provide the platform and infrastructure. To make sure the platform is fast, reliable and secure.
It’s up to the users to take things to the next level. Honestly, I wouldn’t like to see Bubble build plugins because it means they have less resources to fix more urgent matters on a higher level.
I think another big factor would be that this leaves things open for conflict as there are ‘corporate plugin builders’ vs community plugin builders. The Bubble plugin builders may have an advantage as they may have inside information.
Leave it to the community to request, build and sell plugins I would say!
Hmmm… I would have thought the more plugins/easy access to third-parties apps available would encourage new customers, hence it being bubble’s responsibility to ensure those plugins available. It’s not uncommon for various types of web based apps to provide these plugins within their subscription plan. But I’m all up for agreeing to disagree, lol.
Hey friends,
i think i should join this discussion and comment as we are one of the most active plugin builders for Bubble and we have paid plugins which are priced in the $5-$10/month range (along with many free plugins, i should also note)
I hear your feedback and understand that the pricing may seem expensive, but here is a couple of things that i’d like to mention, so you’d have a complete picture to make the judgements.
Each plugin requires significant time of our JS developer (50-100 hours, more or less, it all depends on the complexity), in some cases we also buy a license for using certain libraries. And the revenue from plugin subscriptions right now is just pennies. of course we can reduce the pricing but then it’d be even less income (the demand elasticity is so low that cutting the prices twice wouldn’t increase the number of plugin usage twice). Then also Bubble takes commission, and we have overheads (like running the company, paying taxes etc.) So with the current revenue volumes the ROI is somewhere in the 5-7 year range, and I didn’t even count the time required for bug fixes, updates based on user feedback etc. Yes, the more users Bubble onboards the more revenue we’ll have, and that can drive the plugin prices down, but that would take time i guess. We believe that’s what’s gonna happen and that’s the only reason we continue to invest in plugin development subsidizing the costs from other sources of income.
I agree, the plugin prices may also seem high compared to Bubble’s pricing. But I’m totally convinced that bubble’s entry level pricing ($14) is absolutely undervalued. look at buffer.com for example. They charge you $10/month just for scheduling your social media posts! and their next level upgrade is $99/month! sheetsu (Don't spend days on what you can do in seconds - Sheetsu) charges $16/month just to let you access google sheets in a simplified way! And there are a lot of similar examples. And here we pay just $14/month for building awesome, complex web apps reducing the time and budget of development by 5 to 10 times! i guess (this is just my opinion) - Bubble makes it deliberately low to attract more users and I think it’s a good strategy.
And finally, let’s not forget, plugins are still in beta and we are all still experimenting with this whole idea
Great thread @JonL - almost all developers are also Bubble users so probably simultaneously feel your pain and feel like jumping on to defend their pricing.
But I’ll throw in my developer numbers in case that helps.
I can only speak for my own efforts here - but suspect that at least a handful of other developers would report the same story. My plugin is the most used paid-for plugin (that I know of) and comes in at $5 - that’s $3.80 p/user to me after the Bubble cut.
Initial upfront development of both the free and paid versions was about 15 days - it’s just over 2,000 lines of code between the two of them, and all plugin developers will testify to the joys of the Bubble plugin developer environment - which is in beta. I now spend about 10-15 hours making updates or supporting users each month. My plugin account says my next monthly payment is due to be $34, and in total I have made less than $100 from the plugin.
As a loyal Bubble devotee I find ways of justifying that situation to myself.
I’m with @levon, more Bubble users should make both sides of the balance sheet make more sense in the long run… might take a little time though.
