Building for GitHub marketplace?
Would you consider building an app for the GitHub marketplace? What are your thoughts regarding platform risks and the cost?
If I understand correctly, GitHub takes 5% of revenue as of this year which seems reasonable. It seems like using the API is also free, just with rate limits that I don't think would be too restrictive.
Anyone have experience here they'd be willing to share? Thanks :)
I recently discovered that GitHub does not have an equivalent for Gitlab's Metrics Reports (https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/metrics_reports.html), and am thinking about building a marketplace app with the same functionality. It would be nice to be notified of performance degradations caused by individual pull requests.
Do you have links to how popular the Marketplace is? seems like a untapped opportunity, especially with the free API.
There are ~500 apps and some show how many installs they have. The installs range from 100 - ~80,000 with most being 1,000-10,000.
Damn, that's tiny given their user size. There's definitely people looking for solutions who don't even know Marketplace exists (including me up till today).
My immediate thought is, the bigger IndieHacker opportunity could be a better Github Desktop; something which does more than manage branches and makes it easier to find extensions a la Zapier. VSC's a good example of how big the dev community can rally around something like that if it really improves on the existing product.
I'm currently building a tool that will be distributed on the Github marketplace. So for the development hasn't been bad. Weird differences between webhook payloads and API payloads have been tricky to work with, but overall I'm excited to launch.
Have you run into any issues or foresee them with the rate limiting for the GitHub api?
I haven't run into any issues, but I think that's because my app is more webhook driven than it is API driven.
Ah gotcha, that makes sense!
I don't think i can charge developers, people will just build something for free
Definitely disagree here. Developers pay for tons of services, including on GitHub.
I personally wouldn’t set out to build for GH marketplace. But if I did end up building something because I needed it for a project and it’s a good fit GH, I’d seriously consider publishing it in their marketplace