01 / 08

Product Management · Business Case

Feature Business Case
Plugin Marketplace

Should Open Design open a first-party plugin marketplace in Q3? The case for PM, Eng, Design, and Leadership to land on one option.

Decision owner: PM · Reviewers: Eng, Design, Leadership

02 / 08

Decision needed

Ship a marketplace, or hold the line?

217+ plugins already exist, built for free by the community. Today they're only discoverable through a static home rail — no ratings, no revenue share, no owner of record. We need one call before Q3 planning locks.

03 / 08

The Pain

Four ways the current model breaks down

n.01

Discovery dead-ends

68% of installs come from the top 6 home-rail plugins; the other 211 get near-zero traffic

n.02

No trust signal

No ratings, no verification badge — support tickets show users afraid to install unfamiliar plugin code

n.03

Zero creator incentive

38 external contributors shipped a plugin this year; only 4 shipped a second one

n.04

Unowned support load

112 GitHub issues this quarter trace back to plugins with no listed maintainer of record

Every pain point traces to the same root cause: plugins have no marketplace, so they have no owner, no signal, and no incentive.

04 / 08

Options Considered

Three shapes, one recommendation

$ od plugin marketplace --compare-options

# three options weighed for Q3
option_a: status_quo       # home rail only, curated by us
  trust_signal: none   creator_incentive: none   effort: low

option_b: reviewed_marketplace  # submission queue + revenue share
  trust_signal: verified_badge   creator_incentive: 70/30_split   effort: medium

option_c: open_federation   # npm-style, no review, self-serve
  trust_signal: none   creator_incentive: tips_only   effort: low

recommended: option_b     # only option that fixes trust AND incentive
05 / 08

Tradeoffs

Option B wins trust, costs speed

Options
A / C
Ship in 2 weeks · no review gate · no trust signal
Option
B
Ship in 6 weeks · review gate · verified badge + revenue share
+4wk

added time-to-ship for review tooling

70/30

creator revenue split, our favor 30%

20

creators committed for private beta

06 / 08

Recommendation

Ship Option B in 4 phases

STEP 01

Freeze scope

Review rubric & revenue-share terms locked with legal by Jul 21

STEP 02

Build the queue

Submission form, review dashboard, verified badge shipped by Aug 11

STEP 03

Private beta

20 committed creators list one plugin each; review SLA measured live

STEP 04

GA rollout

Open submissions to all 217+ creators; revenue share turns on

This is the irreversible step: once revenue share is live, pulling the marketplace back costs trust we won't get back. Sign off here, not after Aug.

07 / 08

Measure of Success

North star: long-tail install share

$ od plugin marketplace --track long-tail-install-share

→ Target: long-tail install share 24% → 45% by Q4

#review-sla-under-72h #creator-payout-on-time #support-tickets-flat #nps-unchanged
08 / 08

Approve.

Option B — reviewed marketplace with revenue share. Sign-off requested from PM, Eng, Design, and Leadership by Jul 21.