Installs are not usage: what the Community page does not tell you
The Community page counts installs and likes. It cannot say how many people ran your plugin this week, which feature they used, or whether they came back.
, by Ilia
Figma gives every plugin two public numbers: how many people have it and how many liked it. Both are lifetime totals. Both only go up. If you publish a plugin and never touch it again, in two years those numbers will be higher than today, and they will tell you nothing about whether anyone still opens it.
What the Community page can tell you
The user count is a reasonable proxy for reach: how many people, ever, decided your plugin was worth keeping. Likes are a weaker signal of the same thing. Watching either one week to week tells you how discovery is going, which is useful if you are doing something about discovery: a new cover, a better name, a post somewhere.
There is no API for those stats. The tools that chart them (Fig Stats, PlugStats and the like) read the public page on a schedule. That is fine for a trend line. It is still a trend line of installs.
What it cannot tell you
- How many people ran the plugin this week. Installing is one click, once.
- How many of last month's new users came back this month.
- Which feature they use, and which one you could remove tomorrow with nobody noticing.
- How long a session takes, and whether the long ones are power users or a bug.
- Whether people are in Figma Design, FigJam, Dev Mode or Slides when they run it. That decides what you build next more than any feature request does.
- Where your users are, which is what you need for the "should I translate it" question.
For a free plugin that you maintain for fun, the install count may be all you want. The moment you charge for it, or put real evenings into it, the gap starts to cost you. You ship a feature and have no idea whether anyone found it. You see a complaint and cannot tell if it is one person or a tenth of your users.
The numbers that replace it
Usage analytics for a plugin comes down to a short list.
| Question | Number |
|---|---|
| Is anyone using it? | Daily and monthly active users, from the Figma user id |
| Do they stay? | New against returning, week-one retention, days per month |
| What do they use? | Actions by name, and how many distinct users did each |
| How much? | Metrics: totals per day, median, 95th percentile, max |
| How long? | Session length and sessions per day |
| Where and in what? | Country and Figma editor |
All of it is counted inside the plugin, from a handful of function calls. The reasons a normal web analytics tool struggles to do this are in the note on Google Analytics, and the practical steps are in how to track usage.
If you sell the plugin
Paid plugins get one more useful fact from Figma itself: figma.payments.status says whether the current user has paid. Track your paid feature as an action and the paywall as another, and the adoption numbers for those two actions tell you how many people hit the wall and how many walked through it. That is a conversion rate, and the Community page will never show it to you.
Install counts are marketing. Usage is the product. You need both, and only one of them comes for free.