Yesterday I de-listed my plugin from the Figma community, before I even had my first user.
One week before, I happily pushed the publish button and set a price tag of $20. I was proud to have made something worth charging for, but the whole week it was nagging in my head how it was not ready.
The doubts kept growing.
I was stressed about it, but now I realize: it’s not a bug… it’s a feature! No having a plugin live is my peace of mind for the following weeks, while I enjoy a little holiday in Europe.
The plugin doesn’t need to be live yet. Whoever is interested can ask me to test it locally, and I need to gather a bit more feedback before launch. This also gives the other team members more time to make things more polished without any unnecessary stress.
Over the past month I’ve been working hard on Screenshot to Layout and to be honest it has been a bit intense building the plugin itself — but also all the operations around it. Intense,
Little did I know that to build this plugin, I would also have to build an accounts system, write a privacy policy, learn about layout algorhitms, up my database skills, get better at Typescript, set up a reverse proxy, learn the Figma plugin API and sooo much more.
I put over a hundred hours on top of my regular job in this plugin, and while I am proud of the end result, I don’t want to ship it yet.
The main problem I have now is the pricing. I know I have something of value, and I want to charge for it.
What I want is for my plugin to be a utility that somebody can use for the next five+ years, just paying 1 fee.
Figma’s pricing pushes you to a SaaS if you want to offer a free trial, and I hate that pricing mechanism for a design plugin. Who wants to deal with little monthly bills of $1? And is the plugin worth $60 over a period of 5 years? I don’t think it’s that good. Not to mention the admin hassle it creates.
Right now I am thinking about publishing 2 versions of the plugin, but that seems like a distribution hassle in itself, and I have no way to know which API key belongs to which user.
Another idea is to take the payments part fully off-platform and implement it with a Stripe subscription instead, but that means building more infrastructure to support those mechanisms.
The jury is out there… but first I am going to take some time off.