Hey Dribbble…we need to talk…
We’ve been through a lot together and there have definitely been some good times, but as of late, you’ve become way too controlling—and in ways that don’t make any sense what-so-ever. To be frank, you’re kind of a mess right now. Maybe you’re just going through some stuff, and that’s ok, but it’s not ok to take that out on me. The qualities that drew me to you initially, well those all seem to have evaporated leaving the withered husk of what once was something amazing.
The last few years have been a bit bumpy. First, you decided you no longer wanted to be exclusive and brought a whole bunch of randos to the party. Frankly that put a damper on the whole scene. This place we shared, became noisy, crowded, and let’s face it cringe — it was no longer the intimate and inspirational space it once was.
I’ve put up with a lot from you over the years, but frankly your obsession with controlling every little thing I do is really unhealthy. I need space to be able to grow and myself. This paired with your shallow and superficial personality have driven me to the arms of another.
I’ll always cherish the early years we had together — back when we were able to nurture and grow together. But I just can’t put up with the belligerent mess you’ve become, it’s dragging me (and the entire design industry) down. And so, this is goodbye.
If you’re curious about the specifics read on ;)
What happened (in plain terms)
I’ve been on Dribbble for around 14 years now. When I joined, it was a closely knit community of some of the best designers in the world. It was a place you went to be genuinely wowed, to see real, finished work, get real feedback, and occasionally land a client because of it.
Recently, Dribbble rejected a Shot I posted announcing my recently redesigned (and launched) personal site. Why? Because the Shot linked to my own portfolio, and my portfolio — like virtually every website on earth — has a way to contact me.
That’s it. The violation was simply linking to a finished project.
There was something about this email that just sat wrong with me. There’s the immediate implication of this new rule and what it will do to the platform (further incentivizing superficial, skin deep design work over real launched work), but after thinking about it more, I think it was the fact that this email and new policy amounted to a slap in the face of the people that helped build the platform by bringing their work there. The email was cold and impersonal. It didn’t treat me like a member of the community but rather as a problem.
So I reached out to try to get some clarification and understand the new rule. What followed was five rounds of correspondence with three different support reps, each repeating a version of the same non-answer.
First I was told links are fine if they reference “finished work, a design partner, or a client”, just so long as it’s not anything with contact info. I pointed out that this makes the exception meaningless, since almost any professional site — a client’s, an agency’s, a personal portfolio — has a contact page somewhere on it. If “contains contact info anywhere on the site” is the actual bar, then “links to finished work are allowed” isn’t true.
The reply to that: “If your portfolio contains contact information, it will be flagged.” No engagement with the contradiction. Just the policy thrown back at me.
I escalated and got a longer, warmer, more personalized response from someone who introduced herself as a “Customer Support and Policy Manager.” She acknowledged the frustration, explained the reasoning in more detail — the policy isn’t about intent, she said, it’s about the destination and whether it gives viewers “a way to contact you outside of Dribbble” — and then confirmed, in plain language, that my post was taken down specifically because it showcases finished work and includes a way to reach me. This is true for nearly every design portfolio that has ever existed.
Her advice was to avoid linking out at all. Upload everything to Dribbble instead (visuals, case study, process, outcomes) so viewers never have a reason to leave the platform. The thing is, this is still just a superficial representation of the work. It lacks the depth of the final product.
A broken business model.
This policy reveals what Dribbble now is. Not a community. Not a designer showcase — a cow to be milked. The whole architecture is built to keep designers and the people looking to hire them inside Dribbble's walls, routing potential clients through Dribbble's marketplace, so Dribbble can take a cut. A portfolio link that leads somewhere Dribbble can't monetize isn't a violation of trust and safety — it's a leak in the funnel. They can mask the logic and reasoning all they like, but we know the truth is they simply got greedy. The thing is, Dribbble has done a really bad job of building the infrastructure to support this. Their project briefs are a joke (often only 1-3 sentences that provide no inkling of scope) and the inquiries that do come through are more akin to Fiverr than an actual project (design me a website for $20).
It’s devaluing design.
The whole point of pushing clients to transact on-platform is presumably revenue. So it’s worth asking: How much money is Dribbble actually making off these “Projects”?
A brief for a “Please provide the title” (a UI/UX redesign of Tickivo, a ticketing and event platform for organizers) has a listed budget of $10.
A posting for “Gym Websites” (hero section, pricing, workout programs, trainer profiles, testimonials, mobile-first, the works) — $20.
Run Dribbble’s 3.5% commission against numbers like that and the platform clears 35 to 70 cents a job. That’s less than a credit card processing fee. It is absolutely insane and there is absolutely no way Dribbble is coming out ahead based off projects like this.
Scroll through a single day of briefs and it’s the same story on repeat: $20 for a tuition platform, $100 for an IELTS coaching site, $10 for “BeelaT’s Web Design & Development.” These are all “real” briefs listed on Dribbble.
So this policy does two things at once, and neither is good for Dribbble. It teaches clients design is a $10–$100 line item, because that’s the number attached to it (over and over and over). And it’s doing this in service of commissions so small they barely register. Dribbble is actively devaluing an entire profession to defend a revenue stream worth less than a dollar.
And so I’m leaving.
I’m cancelling Pro and taking my work elsewhere. Not out of spite but out of the recognition that a platform which treats a link to my own finished work as a liability isn’t a platform that’s for me anymore. It’s a platform that’s for itself, at my expense.
Goodbye Dribbble.