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Lots of exciting announcements today on the Airtable Platform! For more information specifically about how this launch impacts developers - including updates to the Blocks SDK and how to submit an app to the marketplace - check out our post here.
We’ll be hosting a live Ask Me Anything (AMA) session in this thread on Thursday 9/17 at 10am PT, where a number of folks from our platform engineering team will be online to answer any developer-focused questions you might have related to building Apps and submitting to the Marketplace.
Feel free to begin posting questions here in advance! We’ll do our best to get to everything we can on Thursday.
Anyone can sign up for developer access to the custom apps platform! You can sign up for developer access through this form.
When getting started, we recommend following the guides on our developer docs site to get the ball rolling. Once you have an app that’s ready for publishing, you can follow the steps in Submitting your app to the Airtable Marketplace to send it up for review.
The TLDR for submitting is that there’s now a block submit feature built into the latest version of our @airtable/blocks-cli tool.
Lots of question on the marketplace - we’ll try to answer most marketplace-related questions here
We absolutely want to make it possible and straightforward to monetize apps in the Marketplace.
In general, we get super excited by the idea of helping foster the kind of ecosystem on Airtable that “creates more value for its participants than for Airtable.” Monetization directly within the marketplace would be a huge part of this.
That said, supporting monetization will be tricky for a variety of reasons.
Building a payments and distributions product, with all the nuances that come with that, is just fundamentally a big hard project.
We need to - as a community, not just as Airtable - tease out what the right model for charging would be for different kinds of apps, and build the trust of Airtable users that apps in the Marketplace are actually good, so that customers are actually interested in paying. “If an app costs money in the middle of a forest, but no customers are willing to actually pay for it, is it actually monetized?” … and such …
There are lots of different monetization models we could support - pay-once, pay-per-base, pay-per-user, freemium, pay-for-support, paid bundles, etc. We need to learn a lot more about which of these would be most appealing - both to developers and to potential customers - to help prioritize.
In the spirit of all of this, we’d love to get your thoughts on how you’d like to see app monetization work - we put together a quick initial form here to get your early feedback: https://airtable.com/shrFQkYXTVzLkwgEY
We’d love to talk to you directly too - so if you’re open to it, make sure to check the box in that form that you might be open to a direct conversation with our team!
We are considering open sourcing more of our apps and creating new open source examples in the future to help developers get started more quickly. Some of our apps (like Gantt) can’t be open sourced yet because they use legacy or internal APIs.
In the shorter-term, if you do choose to charge for your app off-platform, feel free to include this information directly in the app description on the marketplace.
When you submit an app to the marketplace, you also include a bunch of metadata including a description - which would be a perfect place for this information.
This is definitely something we’re also interested in exploring. Our first version of this was the Blocks Contest, which we were super excited about how it turned out.
We anticipate in the near future having some version of more contests, direct “app bounties” (where we specify a use-case in advance), or even something like selectively granting the top X apps a certain reward.
Would be super interested to hear from everyone how much interest there would be in participating in something like this! We’d love to get your feedback and ideas around app incentives in general here: https://airtable.com/shrFQkYXTVzLkwgEY
Submitting a block by running block submit without any other prior contact or registration feels emotionally odd to me.
While I understand that a block/app should be as polished as possible before submitting it, if Airtable finds issues, what is the review process for correcting those issues?
About how long can developers expect it to take from block submit to the block appearing in the marketplace?
How can I tell if I’ve already filled out this form or not? Lol, I feel like I’ve filled out a zillion forms for Airtable signing up for different things.
