We’ve started seeing a lot more products being submitted to the Statamic Marketplace lately. More addons, more starter kits, more people turning an idea into something another Statamic user can install and use. That’s a very good thing. I love seeing it.

It’s gotten wildly easier to make software with AI. You can go from a prompt and a vague idea to a working thing while all binging an episode of The Pitt. The barrier to making things exist has dropped drastically, and we want to embrace that. Used properly, these tools can help us reach places previously impossible and make Statamic useful in ways previously unthinkable.

The problem is that making something exist and making something ready for the Marketplace can now feel like the same step. There’s still a world of work between getting code to run and making a product polished, reliable, and ready for the community to trust on real projects.

The stewarding process

If you're not familiar with the term "to steward", it means to carefully and responsibly manage, protect, or care for something that belongs to someone else or to a larger community. That's exactly what we're doing here, and something we want to get really really good at.

It starts by becoming more deliberate about what makes it into the Marketplace. We don't want it become yet another place to spam links, spraying and praying code like Scarface hoping someone notices your (or your agent’s) work.

This Marketplace should be where the good stuff is easy to find, customers trust what they’re installing, and thoughtful work doesn’t get buried under a mountain of almost-the-same products.

This takes attention. It takes effort. And I have a feeling it’s going to take an adjustment period as well, and we'll all be better for it.

What we’ve put in place

We’ve built three pieces to make this work:

• We just published official Marketplace Submission Guidelines with clear, numbered rules and real examples of what we’re looking for. Honestly, we should’ve had these all along, but we didn’t want any additional friction when the biggest barrier was people finding the time to learn how to build Statamic addons and kits at all.
  Now anybody with a Codex or Claude subscription can build an addon in 20 minutes. We need more friction. Friction will increase quality.
• A product review skill you can download from that page and use with your coding assistant before you submit. Give it your repository and it’ll help you find gaps, rough edges, and things worth testing again. It’s similar to (but not exactly the same as) what we’ll be running on our side, and it’ll save us both a lot of time.
• A review process for every product going forward. We’ll review the work, share specific feedback when something needs attention, and give you a clear path to resubmit it. We’ll be using skills we’re fine-tuning for the first pass, but we’ll be keeping humans in the loop.

There’s a funny little bit of circularity in using an AI skill to help prevent AI slop, but the tools were never the whole problem. AI can help you build something useful, interesting, and polished. You still need to bring the judgment and the taste, and refine the experience of what you’re building. It’s the deliberate design choices that show you care about the person who’ll use it next.

It's a wild place out there

We can only apply these standards to our Marketplace. You can build, share, or sell addons and starter kits anywhere you like — your own site, GitHub, another marketplace, the trunk of a suspiciously well-branded station wagon. These rules only apply to what goes into our own shelves, as it were.

That said, there are some pretty big benefits to being on those shelves. You get a public storefront on statamic.com and visibility wherever people are looking for ways to extend Statamic. Marketplace products are pulled through our APIs into tools like Sherpa and hosting platforms like Laravel Forge and Ploi — putting your work right in the path of someone starting a new project.

For paid products, you also get a whole sales operation without having to build one yourself. We handle checkout, VAT, receipts, license delivery, and refund processing. You get sales and revenue reporting, customer and order records, configurable coupons, and tools to email customers or gift licenses.

Connect your Stripe account once and comissions are transferred automatically when a sale comes in. No payment stack, no payout scripts, no “quick little billing system” you have to maintain. Easy.

The future of the Marketplace

We’re putting more into those shelves very soon. Addon renewal subscriptions are coming for larger products that need ongoing development and support beyond a one-time purchase. We want creators to have more reasons to build ambitious things for Statamic, and customers to feel confident paying for them.

Quality control is part of making that possible. We absolutely welcome your feedback on this process too — want to find just the right balanace of "try harder" and "hell yeah this looks great".

If you’re building something for Statamic, read through the submission guidelines, run the review skill, find joy in the human touches, and send us your best work. We’re excited to see it. 💜