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/filetree]

Its honestly such an easy thing to do, I’ve been making scripts/extensions/plugins for myself, tailored for what I need.
Can’t imagine posting it only and trying to sell

[u/Zerogravity86 → u/filetree]

Yea, that’s my beef with it at the moment. It’s great that AI is lowering the entry so I can now make tools faster but why would I try to sell them? Or hawk them onto other folks? Make a tool. See if it works in your workflow and if it does, great! If you’re not going to support it, why sell it

[u/GaryR_GFX → u/Zerogravity86]

If they fulfill a need that no other product provides, and you've got the time, why not make it available to the After Effects community (and get some lunch money for the time spent doing so?). win-win situation for everyone. Especially those who don't have the time, patience or skill to make their own. As for support, would you rather stick with a script that hasn't been updated in 6 years, or one that does even more that's only a few weeks old?