You can now convert free plugin to paid?

Plugin builders
1

Great find by Alex.

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source: https://twitter.com/the_alexc/status/1677625476049666056?s=61&t=gdj1sZtLxhKtHxUq64jbFg

I decided to try the same with a plugin of mine; it was declined. Here is the answer from support.

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@rico.trevisan The craziest thing is that Bubble removed all (10-20) negative reviews for that plugin (previously ‘amCharts’) (Air Chart Pro: 20+ Premium Charts Plugin | Bubble). That is something they would never do for others, as they were saying each time, to maintain a ‘fair and honest marketplace’. I think this insane how they are actively helping one specific company to succeed on the plugin marketplace.

That plugin now has 50k installs and two 5 star reviews, a big slap in the face to all other plugin devs that worked for years on their plugins.

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Interesting find…definitely shouldn’t have been allowed…

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Hi @rico.trevisan :wave:
I didn’t get the relation between your email and this tweet?
Did you ask for a similar change and this was Bubble’s answer?

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5

Yeah just noticed this! If someone wants to acquire a plugin and make it paid for future users, fine, but it should be the same rules for everyone, not just large agencies. But wiping all of the old reviews without wiping the usage statistics is ludicrous.

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6

this is completely unacceptable

sure, give people the ability to make their plugins paid / transfer reviews

but why the selective enforcement?

for now, i will ascribe this to error and not malice - but we really need to get some clarification from the bubble team

cc @leon.maksin maybe you have some insight into this?

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@Ericberg are you sure they removed bad reviews? that would be insane.

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8

@Kayami 100%.

I also saw Alex’s tweet and the bad reviews were still there by then. Alex even tweeted about it:

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This is, in my opinion, so much worse than everything that happened before (like the pricing debacle). How can we trust that the reviews for the other plugins by ZeroQode are real and not cherry picked? Could this also be happening in other parts of the site?

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I agree with you. In addition, if the plugin has become paid, then they must reset the number of installations. Otherwise it’s not fair to other plugin developers.

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Thanks for making this point here @rico.trevisan. Interested to see the response and rationale for what happened.

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@moderators @staff

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I appreciate the heads-up on this, @rico.trevisan. It is sort of interesting that this plugin was seemingly migrated from free to paid (under new ownership), but kept its installs data while resetting its reviews. (As you can see on its plugin page Air Chart Pro: 20+ Premium Charts Plugin | Bubble)

Knowing this was/is possible wouldn’t likely have changed what I did with List Shifter (I removed the free plugin and migrated it to Floppy) as I really had no interest in interacting with the Bubble team at that point. But yay for the code-farm at Zeroqode, I guess? :man_shrugging:

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13

There isn’t anything the moderators can do, and I’m guessing it might be the same for pretty much all of the Bubble staff. I imagine this one probably needs a reply from Josh or Emmanuel themselves… or maybe Zeroqode could jump in here and provide some insight.

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I’ve acquired a plug-in and I’m totally revamping the plug-in and docs.

Great to know I can get historical bad reviews deleted by Bubble.

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15

“Changed their policy” :face_with_monocle:

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I stand by all of my comments vis-a-vis certain “members” of the plugin community.

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21

Yes, this is correct, to provide some context here:

  1. All our interaction with Bubble is done the same way as everyone else - through support@bubble.io - we do not have special treatment or dedicated managers or whatnot.
  2. We acquired amCharts plugin which had the most installs among charts plugins and very bad ratings - one of the comments was saying why doesn’t Bubble delete these plugins as they don’t work and users just waste their time. Bubble can’t simply delete such plugins because of copyright issues - although I think they could do that based on plugin “quality”.
  3. We’ve revamped the code and made a premium plugin out of it. We simply sent a request to Bubble Support and they processed it just like we did a few times before with our own plugins
  4. Last week we received an email from Bubble saying the policy around that has changed and they requested us to switch it back to free. We will do so soon and will keep a few of the quality charts in that plugin for free including an easy to use demo and detailed docs like most our plugins.

Hope this sheds some light on the situation.
Levon

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22

Lol

Great work from the community for calling this out.

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23

“Rules for thee, but not for me.”

Bubble has lost its way.

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24

Except the policy isn’t changed since the plugin editor has stated clearly from the beginning of time that you cannot change a plugin to to a commercial license once it has been published as a free plugin.

What about the other plugins this has happened with? Are those being reverted as well?

And none of this addresses the removal of the bad reviews…

4 Likes