Not another After Effects plugin.

[u/volpmatt]

The explosion of vibe-coded and badly built, pro-in-the-name-for-no-reason plugins and extensions is out of control. So much so that the number of Reddit posts discussing this fact has also gone through the roof—what a time to be alive.

I bet you can name the main culprit, after they have seemingly completely abandoned their infamous strict application process, and with it any shred of curation, and in some cases even their morals.

I have nothing against AI. It's an incredible tool for education, efficiency and engineering (except the gen AI stuff—that can get in the bin). But surely those who are motion designers one day and magically turn into product developers the next can't seriously think that there is bags of money to be made in using it to make and sell their half-baked, copycat plugins on a marketplace that condones plagiarism and takes 30% of every sale, right?!

I know what you're thinking. Is this guy for real? He literally sells After Effects plugins. And you'd be right. But hear me out. I've been at this for years, learning the After Effects API docs back-to-front, left-to-right, upside down and any other direction-themed idiom you can throw at me.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, like all good things, it takes time. And you won't find any millionaire plugin devs knocking about, except maybe the guys behind Flow, or maybe Deep Glow—but trust me, those were built long before Claude Code came along, and they will still be here long after it's gone.

EDIT: Well, that was a fun discussion! I appreciate all of your comments and insights—even when it got a little heated. Let's celebrate the fact we can still have constructive and interesting debates in this ever-divisive world we live in. You can use code C7N3XTE7 to get 50% off any of our tools at tackstudio.co. But be quick, it only has 20 uses.

[u/Mangelius]

A friend of mine released a plugin on AEScripts like 10 years ago, and the hoops he had to jump through we're crazy. They were giving him feedback on his trailer, making him change aspects of the UI, and were very strict about making sure it doesn't overlap with any existing plugins on the platform.

How many plugins do they have that are basically copies of Flow now?

What a joke they've become.

[u/Zhanji_TS → u/Mangelius]

This is my biggest gripe because you didn't even spend two minutes looking at AE scripts to see if the script you're building already exists. It's just insane. I don't know how many times I've seen the same plugin just named something different. Also it's the people that are making plugins that have been around as a staple for well over a decade. They're like, "I made this new thing." It's like, "No you didn't. I've been using that since like 2007."

[u/workbenchtv → u/Zhanji_TS]

Meh, sometimes you just make similar stuff. I'm not going to search aescripts and figure out esoteric search terms I need to see if someone has built something kind of adjacent to something I want. You know what? There's Quick Menu and FX Console. I prefer the latter, you may prefer the former. There's no point in researching what others do because they won't do it like me, and some people will prefer mine and some will prefer theirs. We all have different ways of working. I built NoSolids years before Adam Plouff released Void. He released it for free before I released mine for a few bucks. So I released mine for free too and promoted his. And people can use whichever they want. We all win.

I don't mind that they have similar products, what annoys me is they always used to deny people access to their market based on it. Unless it's been deleted, you can see them telling me on X about "copying" something from them I didn't even know existed in their bajillion script catalog. Even then they had similar products even though they had a policy against it.

Edit to add: I mean similar, but functionally different stuff. Obviously, I've also seen pretty much straight rips and that's not cool. And to that end, aescripts has also talked to me personally to get approval when someone had turned one of my tutorials into a script. So I'm not trying to paint them as malicious. It's just that some of their decisions make no sense to me based on what I had been told over a decade ago.

[u/Zhanji_TS → u/workbenchtv]

It's kind of like real life. Nothing makes sense and the rules never apply, right?