GitHub Marketplace celebrates one year

One year ago, we released GitHub Marketplace—a new way to promote, share, and sell the developer tools you built on GitHub. Our goal was to create a single destination for our community to discover the apps and services they need without setting up multiple accounts or payment methods. We launched with 14 select integrators. Today, Marketplace serves more than 100,000 users and offers almost 50 tools. Many of you look to GitHub Marketplace as a place to start to building a business, and we’re making it easier for you to do that with each new feature.

Year in review

Growing our ecosystem

From Travis CI to BackHub and Microsoft, exciting new partners are coming to GitHub Marketplace all the time. To make building apps simpler and help businesses grow, we’ve added features like analytics, product placement, and account support. We’ve also improved our onboarding processes and tools, reducing the time to get listed from two months to two weeks.

As a result, Marketplace apps can gain traction fast. For example, Dependabot saw a 10x increase in signups the month they listed their app.

“We built our business on GitHub because it sits at the heart of developers’ workflows—and that’s where we think project management, or any developer tool, should live, too. It’s great to see that GitHub supports its ecosystem partners the same way it does developers in general, with lots of freedom to move work forward. We’re glad to be a key partner in bringing project management close to the code, and we’re excited to see how GitHub will invest in its ecosystem and Marketplace in the months and years to come.” — Matt Butler, ZenHub

Building an integrated product

The Marketplace API is coming out of preview, and over the last year, we’ve worked to bring functionality that was built natively into GitHub Marketplace to other areas of the GitHub platform. For example, you can now add GitHub Marketplace apps directly to a repository as you create it.

New features for integrators

Free apps

If you want to get listed and currently don’t offer a paid product, you can now list your app on Marketplace as a completely free service available to more than 30 million developers on our platform. Free apps make GitHub even more flexible and provide developers with more ways to build on their workflows.

Insights

Whether you’re a team of one or 1,000 developers, knowing how people use your software can help you create a better user experience. We’ve made it easier to get insight into your app’s performance with new data views and visualizations that show you how many people visited your Marketplace landing page, track the impact of your marketing campaigns, and more.

Self-serve onboarding

After seeing a queue of promising apps waiting to join Marketplace, we’ve taken steps to simplify the process. Now partners can quickly get their app onboard and learn everything they need to know to get set up.

“We’re proud to be part of GitHub Marketplace and believe it’s a critical avenue for growth and success for all products in the developer ecosystem space. There is no better platform than GitHub for growth, collaboration, and brand equity. As GitHub continues to concentrate on its ecosystem and GitHub Marketplace, we look forward to enhancing our partnership.” — Josh Kalderimis, Travis CI

Marketplace trials

With the launch of free trials, developers can try your app free for 14 days to make sure they’re choosing the right tool for their team. Over half of the listings in Marketplace support free trials–and we found that supporting a free trial can increase your revenue by 43 percent. In addition, apps that offer free trials now account for more than 60 percent of our revenue on Marketplace.

One year is just the beginning, and we can’t wait to see what you build next. Check out the newest apps on Marketplace or build your own today.

Written by

Corey Hobbs

@chobberoni