I agree that your frustration is very reasonable from a user’s perspective. Feedback like this is crucial for any platform to grow (Just to clarify, I don’t represent Monday.com in any way, nor do I have a marketplace app at the time I’m posting this.)
That being said, I’d like to share a few points from a software developer’s perspective that many users may not realize.
Every software system has limitations, and every piece of software is constantly evolving. The hypothetical end of this evolution would be to address every user request and meet every user’s expectation, which is not practically possible. That’s simply the nature of software.
Building software at scale is extremely difficult. Developers have to allocate their resources to new features based on a priority list, so the evolution process continues toward that hypothetical end. As a developer myself, I can tell you from experience that every user has their own idea of what the “core features” should be.
When a user encounters a limitation in a software tool, they often feel that it should already be a core feature, because their workflows are built around it. But what’s really happening is that they’ve run into one limitation among countless others. If you asked 100 users what “core features” are missing, you’d likely get many different answers.
That’s why it’s the developers’ challenge to collect all this feedback, identify the most common requests, and prioritize them. After all, resources are always limited. Even platforms developed by companies like Microsoft and Google have their own issues.
That said, the Monday.com team is doing a good job of addressing requests. They roll out new features frequently, and they’ve done an excellent job introducing a marketplace. This allows external developers to address requests in their own way, giving users at least some solutions, until they become native features.
Interestingly, even the most popular marketplace apps have relatively small user bases compared to the total number of Monday users. This suggests that those apps were not essential for the majority of users (though, admittedly, some users may avoid them due to pricing or other barriers. Still, even after accounting for that, the numbers would likely remain relatively low. The active user count is actually much lower than the number of downloads indicated for an app, which suggests that the download numbers are a useful metric to gauge how many users were interested in that feature, regardless of whether they actually use it.)
I would argue that the trend of seeing more suggestions to use marketplace apps for feature requests is mainly because more external developers are joining the platform and creating an increasing number of third party apps, which is a really good thing.
The real question should be whether this marketplace growth hinders the Monday team’s plans, which I highly doubt. Why would they deliberately hurt their customer base, knowing it would ultimately hurt their revenue?
