Hey guys, these are all great questions. Here’s how we’re thinking about things right now. As context, we’re actively working on our plugin marketplace policies and terms right now, and plan to publish a much more substantial set of terms when we leave beta and open up building paid plugins to the public. That said, I can preview the direction we’re going with this.
I’ll start with the purpose of the plugin network. This is actually something we were thinking about from day 1… we’re finally getting around to actually implementing it, but this is something we’ve always wanted to do.
We see “no code” as being like building with legos: starting with small pieces, you can snap things together and create things in ways that the lego designers never imagined.
Our job with Bubble is to do a couple things: a) make it really easy to snap legos together in all kinds of different configurations, and b) make sure there are legos in as many different colors, shapes, and sizes as possible (plus the cool robotic ones with motors, and lights, etc.)
For a, we see that as long-term being done by the Bubble team – that’s the core of our product, and while we think what we have today is pretty good, there’s a lot of dimensions on which we’d like to make it better.
For b, we view our role as managing the overall health, but we don’t think the best way to have as much variety as possible is to build all the different lego pieces ourselves. We’ve done it to start with, to get things off the ground, but our vision is to have millions of different lego pieces, for every conceivable possible need, and we think opening things up to the community is a much better way to get there than trying to hire and manage a million developers ourselves.
To switch analogies, we think a forest is healthier and robust than a managed garden. We could decide exactly which plugins are going to be built, how they are going to be used, and what they are going to be priced at, but we think that giving our users freedom to see what works for themselves (tempered by moderation and oversight by the Bubble team) is a much better way of building a healthy ecosystem.
So I don’t see a conflict at all between plugin-building and no-code: no code is about having as many pieces as possible, and as flexible a system as possible for combining them. It’s just a question of who builds the pieces. We want the community to contribute to building the pieces so that we can spend our energy making sure the tools for snapping them together are as powerful as needed. To @projectvisionhealth’s point, we’re still a small team, and we’re actively working on making sure Bubble is a platform that people can trust their businesses with: that’s definitely a full time job right now and there’s a lot we can improve on.
I think one of the big concern behind @StevenM’s questions is, okay, you guys are already trusting us with your apps, but now we’re asking you to trust a bunch of 3rd parties, too. What happens if they flake out, or don’t do a good job supporting the things they built?
One important thing in the marketplace terms we are drafting is that if a plugin seller stops selling a particular plugin, that plugin does not get automatically removed from user apps. Rather, it becomes free, so that people can continue using it until they can find a replacement (or, if it just works, keep using it forever). We aren’t planning to make the code public if that happens without the seller’s consent, but plugin users won’t have to worry about their apps suddenly not working.
We have a couple tools in mind to help ensure the quality of the ecosystem, and I’m sure we’ll evolve more over time as we see what happens. The main tools:
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Moderation by the Bubble team. If plugins are getting a lot of complaints from users, and the developers aren’t being good citizens and helping resolve them, we’ll remove plugins, or, if necessary, developers, from the platform
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Reviews and feedback. I know right now reviews are a little thin on the ground, but as the plugin system grows this will be more important, and we’ll be adding more tools to help float relevant reviews to the top of the list.
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Aligning financial incentives. I discussed the subscription system on the original thread, but I think it’s important to point out how valuable aligned incentives is for this kind of thing.
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Availability of alternatives. We plan to actively recruit developers to participate in the platform, and if there’s a gap, we’ll point people that way. We want the Bubble plugin store to eventually look like the Apple app store where there’s always multiple good alternatives for every need
