Why We Built Imagine Plugins, and Who It's For

There's a pattern that's played out repeatedly across the creative industry. Some part of the creative process is fragmented, opaque, or harder to access than it needs to be, and then someone builds a tool that streamlines it, and a new generation of creators can do things they couldn't before. The work doesn't get worse. It gets more diverse, more interesting, and more reflective of who the creators actually are.

It's not the first time we've seen this. Squarespace didn't just make website creation cheaper, it made web design something a non-developer could actually do, without sacrificing quality or control. Before it, you were hiring a developer, cobbling together templates, or teaching yourself HTML. SoundBetter did something similar for the music production services world: before it, finding a mix engineer or session musician meant posting on Craigslist, cold-emailing people whose websites you'd found through Google, and hoping the process didn't take three months. The infrastructure and platform that made that market work just didn't exist.

One example of this kind of tool: when I was at Waves Audio as part of a small team that worked on the OneKnob series, the proposition was simple. Rather than giving users more control, more parameters, more knobs, more options, we asked what happens if we take on more decisions ourselves and let users get to a great result faster. ‘The more control we give, the better’ the common industry thinking had been. OneKnob challenged that. One knob, professional results, no detour through a textbook on dynamics processing. It was an early example of a type of product that has since become common: tools where the complexity is hidden, the interface is minimal, and the output is serious.

Imagine Plugins falls into a similar category, a tool that makes access to something meaningful easier, without asking the user to become an expert in everything that runs underneath it.

What we kept seeing

Working on SoundBetter for over a decade, we met thousands of creators. Mix engineers with distinctive sounds. Producers with signature chains. Mastering engineers with workflows refined over years. Educators or influencers with an audience that trusted their taste or approach.

Over the years, we kept hearing the same thing from many of them: I would love to make a plugin.

They wanted to package their experience as something other producers could use. Maybe to sell, maybe to give away, maybe just to capture it for their own convenience or their legacy.

Some tried and succeeded, often spending more time and money than they expected. Some explored the options, got partway in, and stopped when they learned the process was more involved, more time-consuming, or more expensive than they'd anticipated. Some never got started at all, because they didn't know where to begin.

The path from “I should make this a plugin” to “I have a plugin” was, for most of these creators, long. The realistic options were:

1. Learn C++, learn DSP fundamentals, learn JUCE, an eighteen-month to two-year investment before you could ship anything. Most working engineers don't have time for that detour.
2. Hire a development team. Spend $30,000 to $60,000 or more on a commissioned build. Wait six to twelve months. Manage rounds of revision where the developer was translating your descriptions of sound into DSP implementation. Hope the result captures what you actually had in mind.

Both paths assumed plugin development was a major, single, expensive event, the kind of thing you did once, carefully, when you had the budget and the conviction and the time. Most creators didn't have all three at once.

That was an opportunity to do something that would make the process and access genuinely easier.

What we built

Imagine Plugins is a no-code platform for building professional audio plugins. The user designs the plugin's signal flow visually, using a library of high-quality DSP blocks, including analog-modeled compressors, EQs, tape emulations, dynamics, modulation, filters, creative effects. They audition the result in real time with their own audio. They design the GUI with customizable components, drop in their own logo and imagery, and connect controls to parameters. They submit, and our build system delivers a code-signed VST3, AU, and AAX distribution-ready installer in days.

The DSP library combines components developed in-house with modules licensed from leading industry DSP developers. The output is commercial-grade, code-signed, format-compatible across every major DAW on Mac and Windows, ready to distribute and sell.

The underlying DSP is professional-grade because it was built by experienced engineers and tested at scale. The GUI components were designed by professionals. The build pipeline handles compilation, code signing, notarization, AAX certification, and DAW compatibility. The user does the part that only they can do, design the sound, design the look, define what the plugin is, and the platform handles everything else.

The result is that a creator can build a commercial-grade plugin for around $1,000 instead of $40,000, in days instead of months, while owning the result fully and selling it however they want.

Who it's for

Imagine Plugins is for creators who are interested in making a product. People who have something others would be interested in, a sound, a workflow, an idea, an aesthetic, and who want to package it as a tool that others can use, learn from, or buy.

The audience we had in mind, and have been hearing from since launch, includes:

Working engineers and mixers with chains they've developed over years, who want to package that work as a signature plugin. People who've been asked “what are you using?” enough times that they know there's a market for the answer.

Content creators, educators, and influencers who teach production. A signature plugin is a natural extension of an existing audience, a way to package your perspective into a tool that lives in your followers' DAWs every day they work, or a way to monetize your audience.

Producers with creative ideas that don't exist anywhere else. A modulation treatment, a saturation move, a signal flow combination they've refined over many sessions. Tools that wouldn't justify a $40,000 development commission but would be valuable to producers in their genre or scene.

Mastering engineers who've developed processing approaches their clients keep asking about. The plugin captures the approach and makes it accessible to producers who otherwise would need to book a session.

Engineers building a brand. Even before you're a household name, a signature plugin puts your name in the plugin dropdown of every DAW it's installed in. Over time, that compounds.

Anyone with a platform. A YouTube channel, an Instagram following, an email list, a teaching practice, a Patreon, a community where you're known. If you have an audience that trusts your taste and your work, a plugin is a way to convert that trust into a real product.

Anyone with a novel idea. You don't need a massive catalog or a well-known name. If you've been thinking about a tool that doesn't exist yet, Imagine Plugins is a way to find out whether the idea works.

What we believe it will do

The realistic outcome we believe in is that thousands of creators who would never have considered plugin development as an option will now build the plugin or plugins they've been imagining.

Some will sell theirs and build small businesses around them. Some plugin makers will use Imagine Plugins to create more plugins faster, iterating on ideas at a pace the old economics made impossible. Some will give theirs away as marketing for their core service work, or as a thank-you to their following. Some will build plugins primarily for themselves, to stop rebuilding the same chain from scratch every session. Some will use a signature plugin as a brand asset that opens doors to other opportunities. Some will discover they enjoy plugin design and build several over the next few years.

The variety is the point. When the cost of trying drops by an order of magnitude, you don't just get more of the same plugins. You get plugins that wouldn't have been viable under the old economics, niche tools for specific scenes, creative experiments that might not work, signature plugins from engineers whose reputations are real but local. The total set of plugins in the world becomes more diverse, more interesting, and more reflective of who the creators actually are.

That same dynamic is what played out at Squarespace in web design or Canva in graphic design. When the access barrier drops, what emerges is broader and richer than what came before. We think plugins are next.

The bigger picture

Imagine Plugins is built around a simple premise: the expertise that goes into a great plugin can be deep and sophisticated, and the interface to building one can still be accessible to people who aren't DSP engineers. These aren't in conflict. The hard work is making them coexist. That's what we built.

If you've been thinking about building a plugin, the chain you reach for, the idea you've been refining, the tool you wish existed, we'd love to see what you make.

The free Vocal Effect plugin was built entirely in Imagine Plugins, as an example of what's possible on the platform. It's a multi-effect vocal channel strip designed around a mixing engineer's signature chain. Available for download for a limited time at imagineplugins.com.