Today we are making a minor yet core change to PromptBase by allowing sellers to optionally list up to 10% of their prompts as Free, alongside their paid prompts.

The aim of this update is to increase engagement and trust for sellers, and increase their revenue longterm.

In this blog post we'll cover why we're making this change and how free prompts will work in the current marketplace.

Why free prompts?

Offering free prompts allows a seller to show off their prompt writing skills without upfront costs to buyers. This helps build trust, encouraging future prompt purchases.

Free prompts can act as a powerful marketing tool, attracting more users to a seller's profile & prompts, and allows them to collect more reviews to increase trustworthiness.

Ultimately, free prompts aim to create a more thriving marketplace. We expect increased engagement for sellers which should lead to more revenue longterm.

How free prompts work

Free prompts are submitted through the exact same review process as a regular paid prompt. Just set the price to 'free'.

We want to stress that in no way is this update designed to reduce the quality of submissions. Free prompts undergo exactly the same tests and checks as regular prompts. Our utmost priority is to ensure a high standard of quality across our platform.

Free prompts will appear on the marketplace alongside all other prompts. There is no visual difference other than they don't have a price.

When a user downloads a free prompt, it will appear in their purchases page like a regular prompt and they can review the prompt as normal.

Free prompts still earn revenue

With the introduction of the app builder at the start of this year, free prompts still have the ability to generate revenue.

When a free prompt is used in the PromptBase app builder, sellers earn revenue for every generation using their prompt.

This creates an interesting new model where free prompts will likely earn more via Uses, compared to paid prompts that currently earn more from the initial sale.

New statistic: Downloads

There's no need to pay for a free prompt, and therefore there are no sales or dollars involved. Therefore, to track the popularity of a free prompt we have introduced a new Downloads statistic.

A prompt's downloads will increase by 1 whenever it is downloaded by another user on the marketplace and its price is set to free.

You can view your total downloads on your account dashboard page, and view a list of individual downloads from other users in the new account Downloads tab.

A download has about the same impact as a favorite when it comes to influencing a prompt's position in search results, with sales still having an order of magnitude more of an impact. Therefore, a prompt with sales will likely be shown higher up search results than free prompts.

Extra details

• A maximum of 10% of a seller's prompts can be set to free, e.g. if you have 100 live prompts then a maximum of 10 could be set as free.
• Free prompts cannot be added to a basket, and cannot be involved in global basket discounts.
• Free prompts cannot be included in bundles. If a prompt in a live bundle becomes free, the bundle will become archived.
• No free credits are rewarded for downloading or reviewing a free prompt.

Conclusion

Since launching 2 years ago, PromptBase has been a go-to marketplace for buying and selling AI prompts.

With this update, we're aiming to make PromptBase the destination for prompts and AI creators on the internet in general, whilst boosting engagement and revenue for existing sellers.

If you have any questions or feedback about these changes, please get in touch using the email on our contact page, or send a message to @ben.