Wednesday, November 11th, 2026
Last Thursday I woke up with the perfect lazy relaxed day planned: I was going to level my Warlock for the WoW: Forever launch, go out for lunch with my fiancée, and then head to the cinema to watch Primetime - perfect.
It did not go to plan.
Instead, I woke up, checked my laptop, only to find hundreds of messages from sellers on PromptBase who were very pissed off.
I have a group chat with 1,000+ sellers who've made over 5 sales on the site - so people who have skin in the game - and they were rioting.
Not good.
The reason was twofold - the night before I launched an update to a "pro tools" subscription - it made the subscription 50% cheaper and added more tools, but also restricted the number of listings you could post per month if you didn't have it to 30/month - mainly to reduce spam.
The second reason was about a system on the site called "PromptBase Select" - which is a $19/mo subscription for buyers that gives them 10 downloads per month of prompts chosen by sellers (usually ones that don't sell).
Select downloads pay $1/download - which is arguably better than $0 if it doesn't sell - but sellers felt it was putting downward pressure on earnings as everyone was flagging items to be included in Select.
People were angry - there were polls about what should be changed, very long messages - my relaxed day would have to wait.
I decided to increase the listing limits to 50/month (and only start them that morning), which unblocked everyone instantly. I also increased Select download payouts by 25% to $1.25, and no new item can be put into Select until they are 2 weeks old.
This seemed to go down well.
I find communicating openly and deploying fixes fast seems to diffuse most situations like this (this isn't my first rodeo).
If anything - I'm glad these people cared enough to kick off, it would be worse if there was silence.
I even ended up making my lunch and movie date - Primetime was pretty good!
