Bubble should buy widely used plugins to ensure stability for critical plugins

When a plugin is widely adopted - @mishav’s toolbox, for example - the Bubble team should buy it and/or offer support for it. It’s the only way to ensure upkeep once it is widely adopted.

@mishav sems to have gone quiet - and as the last post here ( Weird console errors? ) says, there is always the risk that something has happened to the user who built the plugin. What happens in such cases?

Some plugins - Toolbox, CSS tools, and so on, are not just ‘nice to have’ - they’ve become critical to many users’ apps. And, there are thousands of users for these plugins.

In such cases, I’d like to suggest that Bubble should either a) buy successful plugins outright; b) build replicas of free plugins (such as Toolbox); so that in either case, ongoing support is guaranteed for plugins that have achieved critical mass.

Let’s face it - if Toolbox (and similarly relied upon plugins) craps out and the author isn’t around to fix it… Bubble users - and possibly Bubble Team - will suffer.

So, Bubble Team - how about a guarantee of support for plugins once they achieve critical mass? Perhaps you should write something into your marketplace agreements going forward that gives you the ‘right’ to do this (so long as a fair price is paid for widely used apps, to be arbitrated in cases of disagreement).

Thanks,
P

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Make your own: Video: Making a Copy of an Open Source/Free Plugin (Like Toolbox/Run JavaScript)

This issue isn’t really an issue. See link above.

Happy Bubblin’!
Keith

Hi Keith,

Bubble is a non-coder’s platform. To me, telling people to ‘make their own’ plugin isn’t helpful.

Also… 31,000 users use @mishav’s toolbox. In my view, telling 31,000 user to all do the same thing when Bubble could do it at scale is also not helpful.

This is true even for something easy - let alone something hard like building a plugin.

Thanks for your feedback!

P

5 Likes

+1 for this!

I wouldn’t worry too much about this.

Being as widely used as it is if Bubble team changes something that renders the toolbox useless three things will happen.

  1. Bubble community will enrage and will cost Bubble some business.

  2. A bubbler will step up, clone it and will release it OS or commercially.

  3. If no bubbler steps up(highly unlikely) Bubble team will have to clone it and fix it or provide it as a standard feature out-of-the-box if they want to make thousands of apps happy again.

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Hi,

  1. An ‘enraged community’ is something we should aim to avoid. I don’t think that’s an acceptable status quo - that we sit back until an entirely foreseeable bad situation occurs, when it is easily avoided.

2 & 3) Sure - maybe someone or Bubble will step up. But why wait till there’s a problem? Again, it’s entirely foreseeable. And, the outcome is predictable. And the problem is easily averted.

So why wait? Bubble could take proactive steps to avoid this.

Finally - in the time it takes for someone to ‘step up’ - thousands of apps will break. They will not work for days +. Or longer. Causing pointless fear and distress.

And then every plugin user (31,000 in the example) will have to ‘reprogram’ his/her apps to make them work with the ‘new’ plugin. Wouldn’t it be better if Bubble just bought the plugin in advance, so there was no disruption?

Thanks for your feedback!

P

3 Likes

Plugins and specially free plugins are a way to earn some reputation and to brand yourself in order to sell other services.

By acquiring/forking the most popular plugin they would be removing a good chunk of Misha’s reputation without a real need.

Bubble needs to protect also the interest of the plugin developers.

There is no easy solution I am afraid.

There is a mix of client needs, developer protection, ecosystem health and what is morally right that tangles everything.

Yes - and this suggestion is meant to be a win for plugin developers as well.

There’s a lot of forum talk lately about how plugins are generally too expensive. Whether or not I agree with that statement, let’s pretend for a moment that it’s true.

If developers could work on building free plugins - knowing Bubble would purchase them if they achieved critical mass - that would be a huge win for the plugin developers… and in turn, the community. It just might trigger a ‘virtuous circle’.

How many good plugin devs are not building plugins due to minimal payments? The community generally seems reluctant to pay for plugins en masse - few/no paid ‘widely used’ plugins exist… and some users state that they don’t want to pay for plug-ins at all.

Imagine if devs were incentivized instead to focus on (free) users - with successful targets equalling buy-out?

In addition to the ‘virtuous circle’ it could trigger, it might also expand the overall ‘market’. Some users might not be using plug-ins at all due to risk/reliability issues (I’m one of them, and I think I’ve seen other users say similar things in the forum).

But if I knew that Bubble would take ownership/responsibility for widely used plug-ins in future - and that I wouldn’t have to reprogram my app once they did - I would be all over them.

Assuming others like me exist, who won’t use plug-ins currently due to risk of breakage/deprecation in future, then - if Bubble ‘guaranteed’ popular plug-ins - devs might in turn get access to a previously ‘neglected market’.

All in all I see this as a win-win-win.

Win for Bubble, for plug-in devs, and for the community.

Thanks for the feedback!

I prefer not to enter a conversation about plugin pricing. I’ve already been involved in too many and I only know one thing is certain: no one is right and all of them are :slight_smile:

Coming back to your suggestion. I would be worried if a plugin I use had 20 installs. But with more than 30K (apps and not users) a fork with a hot-fix would probably be out in less than Bubble’s average turnaround for any other issue.

I proposed some weeks ago to start a community that would handle these kind of plugins to be supported by the community instead of single users.

It has stalled a bit since due to other commitments but I will come back to this shortly.

I don’t think this has to be necessarily this way…
Bubble could buy and maintain the plugin and still leave the credits to whoever built it in the first place.
Maybe switching its name to “Mishav’s toolbox” like many users already refer to it.
Or it could still show the “built by Mishav” and just add a “Maintained by Bubble”.

This way the developer gets some reward for his free contribution and keeps the credit for building the plugin.

Obviously, selling the plugin would be an option, not an obligation.

All things considered, I see @scriptschool has a point foreseeing 30000 problems if something happens to break that plugin.
Just having to find and replace all the instances I have used a specific plugin would be unnecessarily time consuming.

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