01 / 08

Product Management · Business Case

Feature Business Case:
Plugin Marketplace

Should OpenDesign open a first-party plugin marketplace in Q3? One decision for PM, Eng, Design, and Leadership to land on.

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 — discoverable only through a static home rail, with no ratings, no revenue share, no owner of record. One call, before Q3 planning locks.

03 / 08

The Pain

Four ways the current model breaks down

🔍

Discovery dead-ends

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

🛡️

No trust signal

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

📉

Zero creator incentive

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

🎫

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

📋
Freeze scope
Rubric + revenue terms locked by Jul 21
→
🛠️
Build the queue
Submission + review dashboard by Aug 11
→
🧪
Private beta
20 creators, review SLA measured live
→
🚀
GA rollout
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: 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.