Welcome to Thunkable Pro (opinion)

If anyone knows any amazing engineers to join our team, do let us know!

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This is known. Glad you heard what had to be said. If you now understand better we’re all done here and I’m sure they’ll now keep us updated on their doings.

@amrita Should hire me as Community Manager :joy:

Awesome day all ! :slight_smile:

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I’d like to add a little to Amrita’s points. As Arun writes in our blog post, one of our major goals is to promote the reuse and remixing of Thunkable ✕ projects, in order to enable more users to build better apps. The best way to create great apps is by having publicly available models of other great apps. Related to the above is our goal of giving our app developers a way of showcasing and promoting their projects.

The biggest model for all this is open source software, which is extremely popular and successful in the world of standard software development. Developers of open source software have learned that everyone benefits by sharing their code. It has changed the way almost everyone develops code these days. Open source developers have even found that companies will pay them to improve open source programs and libraries or develop special case enhancements.

That said, sometimes you need or want to develop in private. That is why GitHub (the largest collection of standard open source software in the world) allows developers to create private repositories, for a fee. And that is why we will have have a similar option.

I hope this helps you to understand where this all came from. We understand that it is a change and that change is difficult. We hope that you will all appreciate our desire to grow the overall Thunkable user base and will join and support us.

-Mark

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So you say all of our API keys will be shared with the world?

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API key properties will be deleted when your share a project or when a project in the gallery is copied/remixed.

-Mark

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But what if API key is specified in the blocks section?

You should avoid doing that for any public projects. If you really need to specify those API keys via blocks, my recommendation would be to store those keys in Firebase or Airtable (whose API keys would be specified in a protected component property) and retrieve those dynamically in your app. That’s similar to an approach commonly suggested for open source projects in public repositories.

In the future, we hope to have protections in place for blocks, as well.

-Mark

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Soo after the 3 month trial period ends, if we don’t give you money, you will make our apps public for everyone to see

Thunkable users love the anonymity when it comes to publishing apps, they don’t want people to know how they made their apps.

I don’t think anyone asked for Thunkable Pro, because there was nothing wrong with what we had, What if you made the Thunkable Gallery the Pro feature and feature paying customers?

I read somewhere that your projects will be still private but you will not be able to edit them anymore.

I have not found any information about Thunkable classic for public gallery.

is projects developed under Thunkable classic become public after 10/10/2018?

No. Support of Thunkable Classic will stop in late 2019

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Yes, Peter is correct.

-Mark

The gallery will only be for projects built in Thunkable ✕.

-Mark

Just to clarify what happens after the 3 month trial period ends. Your projects will not be made public – they will stay private but change to a read only mode, which means you can view and live test it – but not edit it (unless you switch it to Public or upgrade to PRO).

Albert

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Originally, I didn’t want to say any more to this topic, because everything I wanted to say is said, but Mark keeps referring to this post.

Yes, correct, but GitHub costs 7$ monthly and is free for all students. Your membership is 238% of GitHub’s pricing (I’m using the regular 200$/year price here). I’m not expecting you to compete with Microsoft, but I think that’s a bit too much and it has to be said. Only time will tell what features we can expect for this price

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:disappointed_relieved:

How would anyone expect Thunkable to grow and improve without charging ? Stop your grumbling. AI is University funded. AI would disappear or have to charge if MIT dropped it. I am grateful to have Thunkable and I have no problem sharing my apps. If I come up with a killer app I want to keep to myself, I will gladly pay the fee.

Thanks, Thunkable

p.s. how much time and/or money have you grumblers contributed to Thunkable ???

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Since my beginning I was wondering what is the business plan for thunkable. Now I know … $$$

Side note: you could probably put ads in a Thunkable X project using a web browser element, and make it go to a GitHub Pages page that contains your ad. Not sure if it would work/violate any Ts & Cs (just a random idea) but could be helpful to pay fees for privatising your apps!

I’ve spent about 3 years on thunkable.

If you include last year, which I wasn’t active a lot because I was focusing more on Android Studio, then that would be 4 years.

If you also include the years I’ve spent on MIT App Inventor, that would be 6 years.

Most people using Thunkable are likely students who are still in high school and have very little income if any at all, or are university/college students who can’t even pay off their debt. I think the price for Thunkable Pro should be dropped drastically, especially with so much competition from other drag-and-drop app builders such as makeroid.

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