New: Custom Blocks Contest with $100,000 in Prizes 🙌

[Michelle_Valent]

If you haven’t had a chance to test out the developer preview of the Custom Blocks SDK yet, now’s the time to give it a whirl. The platform team is offering big prizes for the best blocks in three categories:

• Blocks for Business Teams (5 winners)
• Blocks for Education or Non-Profit (2 winners)
• Wildcard (2 winners)

With a handy UI kit at your fingertips to make polished interfaces a breeze, a CLI that lets you leverage your favorite developer tools, built-in hosting, and real-time that just works - all working in concert with the user-facing Airtable interface you already know so well - we think you’ll find working with Custom Blocks to build powerful apps fast, easy, and delightful.

We’ve even included some use cases to help inspire your blocks! With more than 170,000 organizations powering mission-critical workflows on Airtable today, there’s a tremendous opportunity to expand the functionality of the Airtable platform and help teams around the world achieve more.

The contest runs until July 6, 2020, so head over to Devpost now to get all the details and register: https://airtable.devpost.com/

[Michelle_Valent]

That’s right, thanks Chie and Mary Kay!

[kuovonne]

@Michelle_Valentine Is Custom Blocks available on free plans only until September, the same as for Scripting Block? Or will Custom Blocks remain available to free workspaces a little longer? I asked on this thread, but didn’t get an answer there.

Scripting block was released in February, so it free users will be able use a release version of Scripting block for over half a year before having to decide if they want to pay for the functionality.

However, as Custom Blocks is still in beta, keeping Custom Blocks free only until September won’t give customers much time with a release version to decide if they want to pay for it. (Some companies might not be willing to test Custom Blocks in a production environment until it is out of beta.)

[Bill_French]

kuovonne:

… as Custom Blocks is still in beta, keeping Custom Blocks free only until September won’t give customers much time with a release version to decide if they want to pay for it.

Chiming in, I’ll add these additional observations.

Who Uses Custom Script Blocks?

There are fundamentally four classes of Custom Script Block “users” -

1. Independent developers
2. Enterprise developers
3. Airtable customers unaffiliated with an enterprise
4. Airtable customers affiliated with an enterprise.

Custom Blocks are built and published by two classes of developers and their Custom Block solutions are generally consumed by two classes of users.

To incentivize innovation with Custom Blocks, Airtable will do well to ensure all developers (class #1 and #2) will have full and unrestricted access to be able to explore, develop, and test new Custom Block apps. Anything short of this, and innovation and expansion of the development community will be constrained.

Since users in class #4 are [by definition] “enterprise customers”, I suspect these users would ostensibly have access to Pro features.

That leaves class #3 - free and paying customers who - in my view - will not likely be compelled to pay for access to blocks [alone] unless they need more than a handful of blocks.

Why should a paying customer who uses just the CSV Import Block subsidize users who pay the same monthly rate but employ 25 blocks? Imagine if access to all 2 million iOS apps were available for $29/month and you only wanted to use the weather app.

However you might parse this question, it suggests that blocks should be available in an a-la-carte menu that offers block-level pricing - ergo, a block store perhaps.

[Aditya_Sonel]

Are we need to get pro account for participating in blocks contest??

Because on free account, I am getting an option to integrate custom block!!

[Kamille_Parks]

You don’t need a pro account to make a custom block/participate in the contest. The contest does end in 2 days though so hurry!

[Oliver12]

Hey, I was just having some issues creating custom blocks and I wasn’t exactly sure how to reach out. For some reason when I try to create my first block using Kasra’s tutorial I get ‘zsh: command not found: block’, after having installed the Block CLI. Is there something I’m missing? Thanks!

[Kasra_Kyanzade1]

That usually happens if the folder where npm installs global packages isn’t on your PATH. You can see the path of the folder by running: npm config ls -l | grep prefix

On my machine, running macOS I see the following output:

prefix = "/Users/kasra/.nvm/versions/node/v12.14.1"

Then if I do echo $PATH, I see that /Users/kasra/.nvm/versions/node/v12.14.1/bin is in the list.

[Kamille_Parks]

After the deadline has passed, will be able to see everyone’s submissions? Or will that be left to the discretion of each submitter?

[Widgetic]

The submissions are open sourced, so most likely we’ll be able to see them. :slightly_smiling_face:

[kuovonne]

The rules for the contest say that we must include an invite link to the Airtable base where the fully-functioning Block is released.

Make sure you are sending the base share invite link (and not just the URL)

What level of permissions should this invite link include? Creator? Editor? Commenter? Read-only?