What is Weebly Developer Platform?
Weebly introduced developer center as part of the carbon upgrade on 1st Oct 2015. This helps any third party developers to build apps and sell on the app center marketplace. The app can be an element, backend services, theme or a dashboard card. Once approved the apps can be published publicly and users can connect the apps to their sites from the app center though Weebly site editor.
Weebly Developer Center
How to Register for Weebly Developer Platform?
You need to have a normal account in weebly.com in order to create a developer account. Login to your Weebly account and then open the developer site on another browser window. Clicking on the “Admin Login” button on top right will allow you to login to the developer portal automatically. Fill out the detail of website, about you and contact emails to see the dashboard as shown below:
Weebly Developer Platform Dashboard
When you create a developer account, a new testing site will be automatically added to your Weebly account. As a developer you can create apps and test it on your testing site before submitting for review. Below is the complete App submission process as per Weebly:
Weebly App Submission Process
Approved apps are released to app center marketplace and available for users to connect to their sites. Learn more on connecting app from Weebly app center.
Revenue Sharing with Weebly App Center
The apps on Weebly app center can be sold for free as well as a paid service. The whole concept works on a revenue sharing between Weebly and the developers. The revenue sharing works with 70:30 where developers need to pay 30% of the revenue to Weebly when the earnings reaches the threshold value of $2000 in a payment cycle. The developer will earn 100% if the earnings do not exceed $2000 in that payment cycle.
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Weebly developer platform is an option for third party companies to develop and sell apps to around 30 million existing users.
- Since Weebly does not have many important features like social sharing, it is an opportunity for developers to build quality app and make money.
- From users perspective – they can easily enhance or add new function to the site with easy app integration.
Cons
- Quality of the apps in app center is really questionable. Even Weebly’s own apps are delivered with many bugs.
- Most of the apps need third party account which does not make real sense for the users. For example, instead of creating a third party account for installing analytics code, users can easily use Google Analytics for free.
- You can’t offer the app for free if the feature is part of one of the Weebly’s premium plans. For example, you can’t offer a site search function for free since site search is a pro feature in Weebly.
- From users perspective, paying separately for apps will skyrocket the budget. For example, a business plan user paying $25 per month to Weebly needs to pay additional $15 for using a “StoreMetrics” app’s pro plan.
As of now Weebly allows only public apps and later releases may include the possibility of using an app in private mode where the developer can decide the access to specific users. Also there are no free or premium themes sold in app center while Weebly claims themes are part of the app center apps.
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