What Bubble Plugins Will Still Matter in 2027?

Questions
1

AI is changing app development fast, Bubble keeps adding native features, and many plugin categories already feel saturated.

So which plugin niches do you think are actually future-proof?

And which plugin categories are slowly dying already?

2

I would say if/when Bubbleā€™s AI gets going well, we shouldnā€™t need most plugins.

We should just be able to ask the AI to do what most plugins would do.

The only reason we would still need plugins would be to connect to infrastructure like Stripe, Plaid, etc.

Right now, it seems thereā€™s a gold rush in making plugins. Quite certain a lot of them are AI-madeā€¦ and Iā€™m not all that certain the builder is always even familiar with Bubble.

Weā€™ll see how long it takes Bubble to get their AI up to speed and how powerful it is

3

It probably depends on complexity? Plugins that solve very point to point problems that need a workaround will probably go away.
Plugins that handle more complex tasks and solve/simplify complex problems will stick around

4

One important thing to understand is that the AI inside Bubble, or even tools like Buildprint, still depends heavily on the Bubble ecosystem itself to generate elements and components.

You canā€™t realistically ask Bubble AI something like:

ā€œHey, recreate this fully custom dropdown component from this screenshot.ā€

And expect to receive it exactly as is, or in the form of a plugin to facilitate reuse.

At least not yet.

You know, a reusable, polished, production-ready component with advanced functionality, flexibility, customization, accessibility, edge-case handling, proper responsiveness, animations, and long-term maintainability is still extremely difficult to generate automatically.

The reason is simple: Bubble AI is limited by the infrastructure and components available inside the current Bubble ecosystem. It will naturally rely on native elements, existing workflows, and eventually marketplace plugins to recreate functionality.

If something doesnā€™t exist natively or through available plugins, the AI would essentially need to build it from scratch in code, and we are probably still far from this point becoming reliable enough for production-grade plugins.

The IA used in tradicional coding or ā€œvibe codingā€ tools donā€™t have the same limitation because their ecosystem is basically the entire public web. They can access public libraries, frameworks, documentation, examples, repositories, UI patterns, and huge amounts of existing code. Iterate over it, create variations, etc, etc.

So personally, I donā€™t think plugins will become obsolete anytime soon, especially the complex ones.

That said, I agree with what @senecadatabase mentioned. Recently Iā€™ve noticed a huge amount of plugins being published every day, many of them clearly rushed, with missing edge-case handling, limited testing, or basic issues being fixed only after users report them.

Weā€™re also seeing many developers who were never active in the community suddenly publishing more plugins than long time agencies or experienced/long time Bubble developers.

Sure, we have cases of prodigies like @georgecollier, who in a relatively short period working as Bubble Dev brought many contributions to the community as a whole. But these are rare cases.

And Iā€™m not saying this lightly. Iā€™ve been active on this forum almost every single day for nearly 5 years, over 1600 days, to be a little more precise. Learning something new almost every single day. Before that, I was already building with Bubble, and Iā€™ve been working with it professionally for the past 5 years.

Like many long time users, Iā€™ve hit countless platform limitations over the years. Some of these were resolved by Bubble itself on new versions and releases. But sometimes the solution was building my own plugins, writing custom code, or creating complicated workaround systems using native elements and a lot of logic, conditionals and states.

So what worries me (not me personally, actually), but should worry the community, is the long term support.

Will all these creators still be around in 1 or 2 years maintaining dozens of plugins?

If 10 different bugs were reported today across 10 different plugins from the same creator, how long would it realistically take to fix everything, while ensuring that fixing one thing doesnā€™t break three others?

In these cases, if the plugin was heavily generated by AI without the developer truly understanding how it works internally, then caution becomes really important. Especially the free ones, where the creator often has little to no incentive to provide long-term support.

For example, I saw a post the other day about a plugin that many Bubble users rely on. Like many other free plugins, itā€™s actually extremely well made.

But how many developers are truly willing to maintain that level of commitment?

@julienallard1 for example, even mentioned that he no longer actively uses Bubble, yet he still took the time to update the plugin, fix issues, and provide support to the community.

How many others would realistically do the same?

Thatā€™s the part people often overlook when choosing dependencies for production applications. A plugin is not just a piece of code code, itā€™s also long-term maintenance, support, updates, compatibility fixes, and someone willing to stand behind it months or years later.

I understand why many users choose free plugins to save money, but we have a common saying around here that applies perfectly to this situation:

ā€œSometimes cheap becomes expensive.ā€

A plugin that saves you a few dollars today can easily cost you much more later in debugging, instability, missing updates, broken dependencies, or lack of support when something critical stops working.

People often donā€™t fully appreciate this.

Sometimes a $10 plugin is considered ā€œexpensiveā€, but very few people truly understand the amount of time, testing, problem-solving, maintenance, documentation, support, and experience that went into building it.

Many of these plugins are the result of hundreds of hours spent dealing with platform limitations, edge cases, browser inconsistencies, performance issues, UX details, accessibility concerns, responsive behavior, and long-term compatibility.

And unlike a one-time product sale, plugin development often comes with ongoing responsibilities: updates, bug fixes, support tickets, platform changes, API changes, and user requests.

From the outside, it may look like ā€œjust another pluginā€.

From the developerā€™s side, itā€™s usually years of accumulated knowledge condensed into a reusable solution (Iā€™m not talking about the AI generated ones).

Thatā€™s something many people overlook.

Good plugins are often not just ā€œfeaturesā€. They are years of accumulated experience, platform knowledge, debugging, problem-solving, and architectural thinking transformed into something simple for others to use in just a few clicks.

Iā€™m reminded of some of the solutions Keith created over the years. Solutions that clearly required an enormous amount of research, experimentation, coding, and hard work behind the scenes.

Yet many of them never really received the recognition they deserved.

At the same time, countless Bubble apps still rely on those solutions today because he took the time to package all that complexity into reusable plugins and offer them for almost nothing.

Anyway, like many other experienced Bubble users, I always emphasize the importance of minimizing unnecessary reliance on third-party services whenever possible. And yes, that includes plugins too.

But if youā€™re going to use some, check the creatorā€™s profile.

Are they still active?
When was the last time they they were online on the forum?
Do they still provide support?
When was the last time the plugin was updated?
Is it a plugin that will handle something extremely critical?
If thereā€™s a issue, what will be affected? Will there be a temporary workaround?

You know, things like thatā€¦

5

Yes, the major difference is the plugin creators level of experience, understanding and dedication to bubble, to determine how good of a plugin they can deliver.

Lots of AI slop seeping into Bubble plugin ecosystem by new bubble usersā€¦kind of tiring to see so many posts about free and pro versions, most assuredly an AI suggested approach to how to make bubble plugin business. Most that Iā€™ve seen seem to not have been the result of the creators need for such a plugin or expertise in bubble leading them to the creation of the plugin. Just a rush to push out something AI ā€œbrainstormedā€ (AI can not brain storm due to lack of logic and intelligence), AI suggested build pattern, AI generated showcase post script etc.

ā€œand here is what everybody is missingā€, ā€œand here is what nobody talks aboutā€ā€¦AI is ruining so much of the internet

6

A lot of AI slop in general everywhere.

But I do think the low-cost/free ride is coming to an end with a lot of AI.

I use Cursor connected to a GitHub Codespace a lot, and charges are starting to go up all over. Copilot has signups paused right now while they work out their new pricingā€¦ a lot of upset people, but I think it was inevitable.

So, I do think some of these free plugins, etc., may be harder to keep updated in the future when the builder is strictly using AI to build them?

I did think this was an interesting article on the price increases:

7

Itā€™s going to be a problem for new users. Plugin marketplace made sense pre-AI in the same way that the ā€œcomponent libraryā€ made sense pre-AI. Thereā€™s simply too much slop out there that can be harmful for users who donā€™t know any better. Bubble will always take the blame for any bugs, errors, or security issues that stem from plugins.

What we need is an official Codex or Claude Code for building plugins that automatically uses best practices to build on top of the base app. That way you get the best of both worlds, the stability and reliability of the base architecture, and then the freedom to build literally anything you want extremely fast. If Bubble figures this out in the next few months, they can actually win the AI app layer completely. Otherwise Anthropic or Replit or someone else will beat them to the punch.

As a side note, plugins will always be necessary to fill in the gaps in the official platform. There are too many missing pieces of functionality for a Bubble app to ever be useful with 0 plugins. I just recently had to build a plugin for something that seems like it would be part of the core functionality, but isnā€™t:

8

I completely agree! However I believe there is a certain level of responsibility on both the buyer and seller when it comes to plugins. In my case, I spent the past 2 or so years learning bubble and getting good enough at it to understand where there are gaps. A lot of these gaps are derived from my own experiences.

Plugins should realistically be solving a problem but there are some things that might not be a problem but rather a time consuming task. In those cases I guess itā€™s not horrible to download lightweight plugins for things that might take valuable time out of your development just for something very trivial.

Overall I feel like the plugin market wonā€™t go obsolete but instead slow down. Mainly plugins that make time consuming tasks a lot easier will last.

I personally connect my plugins to the business I am trying to raise money for. I think of an issue I face while building and create plugins that not just me, but everyone can utilize. This promotes good faith and trust between a plugin seller and buyer and that is how it should be.

9

I agree. That had been major reason for why Iā€™ve been questioning bubble approach to AI for past 18 months, especially how they will price it or attempt to bake it into costs. Will be horrible if they bake it in and do not have it as standalone add on feature at its own additional price, because bubble can not subsidize it forever, that would just be poor marketing spend since bubble ai is mostly used as a get new user marketing tactic

10

Great discussion so far. @Newed dragged the reality of production-grade components vs. AI, and both @fede.bubble and @senecadatabase make solid points about how basic point-to-point workaround plugins will eventually be handled by native AI.

Since the simple stuff will inevitably become obsolete, Iā€™m curious about the highly complex gaps still left in the ecosystem.

What specific functionalities or infrastructure connections do you desperately need right now that are neither native to Bubble nor available as a reliable plugin?

What missing features are still forcing you to build massive workarounds? Would love to see everyoneā€™s wishlist!

11

Hahaa

12

AI has made it more common, but thereā€™s a pretty long history of people entering the plugin marketplace and quickly giving up.

It usually goes something like this:

  • People do a very high-level analysis on the plugin marketplace and see paid plugins with really high install numbers (these install numbers are often vastly inflated)
  • They assume these plugins are doing big revenue (mostly theyā€™re not)
  • They release a huge number of plugins in a short time that map to the most popular plugin categories (one such example here)

But then they realise:

  • Itā€™s very difficult to get a new plugin off the ground. Bubbleā€™s marketplace search really favours old plugins with an established install base over new ones, even if the old ones are poor quality
  • Churn is high and customer support requires serious time and effort

So the new plugin creator often gives up and leaves a bunch of ā€˜ghostā€™ plugins that are unsupported.

Of course this isnā€™t always the case. There have been a few new entrants over the past couple of years who have built genuinely useful plugins. @Newed one good example.

13

My guess is Bubble will need to change its pricing again. And my guess is like everyone elseā€™s guesses, just a guess.

But, you can build on Bubble for months and years and never run out of credits or need to pay anythingā€¦

thatā€™s a great thing with Bubble. The learning curve is high, but you have all the time in the world to learn and perfect things.

With AI, Iā€™m not sure how someone could keep building for months and years or whatever and not have to pay. It seems there would be a breaking point.

Iā€™ve seen where some Bubble users will have their whole portfolio on a free siteā€¦ and other built sites that they use and never need to pay for.

So, to your comment on AI, it wouldnā€™t surprise me, and probably shouldnā€™t surprise anyone, if pricing changes to reflect the use of AI?

14

It should cost, but not everybody, only those who use it

15

Hey @xarybhat123 ,

Built plugins for a few years now, and my test is simple: can Bubble absorb the category natively? If yes, that plugin is on borrowed time.

Fading:

  • Basic UI elements (sliders, tabs, accordions), native covers these

  • Thin ā€œAI generatorā€ wrappers , Bubble already integrates 300+ AI models, so no moat

  • Simple API connectors and Stripe wrappers, saturated

  • Basic charts

Anything thatā€™s just a convenience layer over a few clicks is dying.

Future-proof:

  • Native mobile device features as the mobile builder is still beta and missing biometrics, deep links, advanced camera

  • Real-time / collaborative stuff ā€” live chat and presence still need custom WebSocket plugins

  • Deep, messy integrations where the real value is ongoing maintenance

  • Workload-unit optimization tools

THE RULE: plugins survive where Bubble structurally canā€™t go (device hardware, real-time infra) or where the actual product is maintenance, not the initial build.

AI doesnā€™t break this logic, it sharpens it. Trivial plugins get easier to clone; the hard ones stay hard!

16

:index_pointing_up: Bubbleā€™s extreme inflation of install-count display creates false confidence for buyers and false signals for plugin makers.

Buyers see high install numbers and assume a plugin is proven and supported. Plugin makers see those same numbers and assume the marketplace has more revenue than it really does.

Itā€™s super easy for Bubble to fix it especially since they handle a building but the inflated numbers provide a short-term upside for them.

and obv https://docupotion.com/ this is one of the staple apps, staple plugins for anything Bubble. ā€¦

17

Itā€™s still a hit or miss with paid plugins. There are many paid plugins that have ended support or have only partial features. At least with free plugins, I can fork then fix or build on them.

Itā€™s the reason why I never release paid plugins. I cannot promise support (I used to mention that any updates depend on my own needs) but I try to keep comments and not minify the code so someone else can just pickup where I left off or fork their own implementation.

So true!

18

True.

19

Yesā€¦ after itā€™s working right