New Anki Addon Platform

Anki Add-ons
1

So I thought I’d share this here.

I’ve been working on an Anki Addon Platform that aims to make addon discovery more transparent and user-friendly. The main goal is to help users more easily search for addons, understand whether an addon includes paid features (Lite versions, Patreon support, subscriptions, etc.), and provide a more modern and fair rating and feedback system.

For developers, the platform is also intended to simplify tracking downloads, comments, updates, and overall community engagement:
https://anki-addons.com/help

It’s still a work in progress, but I’d genuinely love to hear what you think and get some feedback from the community.

This project is not intended to replace AnkiWeb in any way — the primary focus is improving addon search, discoverability, and transparency.

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Take a look:
https://anki-addons.com/

The homepage design is inspired by the excellent work of Toby Rea’s “anki-landing-page” project, which he generously released under the MIT License (linked in the footer). Huge thanks to him for open-sourcing it.

Also, this project is not meant to criticize the Anki developers at any point. Similar to Ankimon, this simply started as an idea I was excited about and wanted to build.

A large part of the codebase was created with the help of AI, but I’ve tried to implement strong security practices wherever possible, including OWASP Top 10 considerations, reverse proxy, cloudflare bot protection, online and offline database backups, and additional measures to help keep user data safe. Users can also download their own data at any time.

Also anyone who would like to join the journey or would be interested what other security measures, ideas and more should be included - Feel free to hit me up.

Wishing all of you lots of luck with your studies and projects.

Yours truly,
Unlucky

2

Thanks for your work.

But do I have to log in to the website to download it? It’s fine that there’s an add-on number on Anki, but there’s no direct link.

I noticed the source code button is there, but of course, there’s no website. Something crashes when I select “Most Popular.”

Thanks for “How to Install Add-ons”!

I see nothing in “How to Install Add-ons” right now.

You know, we’re so lazy that if it doesn’t generate profit, we don’t even want to post it anywhere else. Many are so lazy that they don’t even write a proper description. So the programmer should do their job, and someone else should promote it. Then, of course, the product should be paid, even if it’s just $3. But if it’s useful and updated at least once every six months, then it’s worth supporting the developer in this way. But most add-ons are downloaded maybe 20 times :), or even more, thousands of times. I see maybe 500 people downloading them during updates, but they probably just don’t even know they have it and don’t know how to use it properly. So maybe 10 people at most will actually pay. Who would spend $30 every six months on each add-on… and there’s more than one, some people have hundreds? The only people who can tell is the person who finds the add-on useful, or who found it so easy to create that they didn’t mind investing the time.

I think young people will appreciate this; they have a greater desire to change the world! Statistically, about 95% of all projects don’t become profitable, but it’s good experience for their future professional careers. So good luck to you, and perseverance in achieving your goals!

3

@kaiu

Thanks a lot for the detailed feedback and thoughtful comment — I genuinely appreciate it.

If you are concerned having to pay for the website use - you do not need to pay or subscribe to use the website. The “Buy Me a Coffee” button is completely optional and only intended for anyone who wants to support infrastructure costs such as the VPS, domain, or SMTP services.

Regarding downloads and login: currently, the idea behind having downloads go through a login in the platform is mainly to improve download tracking. One limitation I noticed with the current AnkiWeb system (at least from my understanding) is that every update download and every fresh install are counted the same way. I wanted to experiment with a system that better estimates actual unique users while also making it harder to manipulate rankings through repeated downloads.

The “Active Developer” badge is also part of that transparency idea — it is only given to developers who updated their addon within the last 6 months, so users can more easily see which addons are actively maintained.

For installation instructions, developers can now add FAQ sections directly to their addon pages to explain setup, usage, troubleshooting, and installation steps in more detail. That is also the purpose of the “How to Install Add-ons” page:
https://anki-addons.com/install-addons

It seems there may currently be a 404 or loading issue there — thank you for pointing that out. I’ll investigate and fix it soon.

I also tried reproducing the “Most Popular” crash you mentioned but could not recreate it on my side. If you happen to remember what exactly happened before the crash or what device/browser you used, that would help a lot with debugging.

And yes, I absolutely agree with many of your points regarding addon ecosystems and monetization. A lot of addons are passion projects, and most developers will realistically never earn meaningful money from them. Many addons are maintained purely because someone personally finds them useful or enjoys building them. The goal of the platform is not to force monetization, but rather to make things more transparent for users — especially since many addons already use different models like Lite versions, Patreon-supported features, subscriptions, or one-time purchases. I wanted users to be able to clearly filter and understand those differences.

At the end of the day, I mostly see this as a hobby project and a learning experience. It may succeed, it may need major adjustments later, or it may even fail entirely — but I still think building things like this is valuable and fun, especially for learning and experimenting with ideas.

Thanks again for the encouragement and kind words — I really appreciate it.

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Reloading the site no longer indicates an error. It’s weird, but it happens :slight_smile:

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Looking interesting!

We’re planning some work to improve add-on experience for users and developers. A survey will be shared soon. I also created a label for AnkiWeb issues on the GitHub repo; feel free to create some issues: Issues · ankitects/anki · GitHub

6

I would give other statistics like ratings on AnkiWeb or downloads more focus, if that’s easy to do. Some addons are useful while being extremely simple and thus never needing an update. Actually assessing whether an addon never getting updates is due its simplicity would require reading the source code which could actually be automated nowadays.