Figma Plugins - macwright.com
At the beginning of 2023, I released a Figma plugin called Placemark, which lets you create vector maps in Figma, the graphic design tool. Since then I’ve been maintaining that plugin for fun, and introduced another one, Placemark Globe.
They’ve been somewhat successful! The Placemark plugin has 11.3k users, according to Figma’s community site, and Placemark Globe has 1.5k users. The feedback loop for plugins is okay - you can see how many likes your plugin has received, and how many “users” there are, but no change-over-time statistics, so I built my own dashboard for the plugins using Observable.
But even with that, I don’t really know whether many people are actually using them. Maybe “users” means unique installations - it certainly doesn’t mean active users because the charts I’ve generated go “up only”, and I know that active user numbers are more volatile than that.
I’m pretty fascinated by Figma plugins because of the challenges of sandboxing. Plugins are, by nature, third-party code that has access to a user’s documents, information, and to some extent, their computer. You want a plugin to be powerful, but safe.
