Hello extension makers
Hey all, just joined this group. I'm not focused on this space exclusively but it is where I started my indiehacking journey about 4 years ago. I make extensions every now and then, on average a few each year. I have about 10 published extensions at the moment across different accounts and about 100K active users. Also about 5 that have been taken down - oh well!
I make extensions for chrome and since last week I also have 1 published in the edge store. Made one for firefox but their manual review process was too much and I never tried again. I have never made any extensions for safari because afaik that requires apple license to publish which is way too much money given that I make free extensions. No clue about opera. I've used that browser maybe once in my life.
I have made this open source node.js tool to help me make extensions faster. It maybe useful to you, maybe not. Anyway, @ me if you want to talk about extensions, publishing, anything.
Can browser extension make some money? Just curious if the users are willing to pay in this marketplace
Yes. A 100% yes, but it has little to do with it being an extension. Users pay for whatever makes their life simpler - if they see a value in it, they will pay.
Might be a story for another day, but I've sold one extension I made years ago for $10000 per install and I had about a hundred users.
We need to hear that story!
Also, to OP, Honey (https://www.joinhoney.com/) was purchased by Paypal for $4 billion. So yes, they absolutely make money!
💯😀
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I was generalizing -- the comment is about being able to make something users want rather than something in particular -- this really applies to any company, from gadget makers, to grocers, to saas, etc.
As to the dangers of extensions: while true, most of the places a developer has the ability to publish are pretty well filtered in various ways -- even so, there is a pretty constant stream of raised alarms and action taken. And I do find ethics to be a somewhat flexible thing -- having come from a deep privacy background, my own experience tells me that extensions are by far the least evil -- you'd really need to take down all the data aggregators and collectors that currently operate in the open across majority of the websites before we'd need to start looking deep into addons.
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Absolute. Very extreme example but Honey recently sold for $ 4B.
More realistic example: one of my favorite extensions is Tabby Cats new tab extension. It adds cats to your browser tabs. You can pay to upgrade if you prefer dogs =D. There are other paid options as well.
Right now Google has disabled payments in the chrome web store, and they are suspended indefinitely, so need to find alternative solutions for actually charging money though.
So does it mean that Chrome extension cannot be monetized directly through Google anymore? At least in-app purchases seem to still work.
The ones you are seeing were probably approved earlier. No clue when Google will re-enable this.
I am interested in seeing any indiehackers here are making some money. When I looked at the products page, very few are working on a chrome extension.
Honey is definitely the most successful case. However I don't think the success can be duplicated for ordinary bootstrapped founders. There are too many factors involved
It's not making me rich, but I made Rocket Note (https://getrocketnote.com), and I net between $100-$200/mo right now with a 30-day free trial to $2/mo paid conversion. Never did any marketing, planning on sponsoring some YouTubers to see if I can pull more revenue. :) As for monetization, I use Paddle and run my own server for it as a SaaS business, so I never used Google's own in-app payments system for extensions. Hope that helps give some kind of an idea!
Yes I'm interested in seeing IHs who make money in this space as well. It is not common, but I have seen this one.
Beyond money, there are other advantages to this space though. The web store has a magnitude less published items than Play Store. When you build something that is useful, you can get attention fairly easily. From there I have learned how to do analytics, talked to actual users, and other interesting things that you cannot learn until you have some users. When looking for a low barrier to entry, extensions are a great place to start.
Yes, I followed this guy on Twitter. His extension toastlog.com is also doing quite well. I felt surprised about the sales when I first saw it.
Personally, I won't buy such simple product that is similar as pressing Ctrl + I in my browser.
Same, my purchasing barrier is very high also.
I believe it works against me in indiehacking though, because instead of seeing a potential for a sale I look at things I've made thinking "why would someone pay for that" and end up making free software. I need to get better at valuing things I make even if they are simple. I am actively working on getting past this mindset.
If you ask me why someone would pay for toast.log, I would say it's completely due to marketing.
A slick UI for $13 is cheap. Just like an ebook I bought. It doesn't matter whether I finish reading it or not. A theme for $13 is also good. It's a cheap digital toy
I will rather focus on practical people like me. Simply because I don't know how I can market a $13 product.
The funny thing is I can sell my app at $15.99 / month
Yes! Our very own @jdnoc makes $41k/month with a browser extension!
If you want to take payments in your extensions, I made ExtensionPay which allows you to take one-time and recurring subscription payments without needing to make your own server backend. Saves you weeks of tedious work.
Hey, thanks for posting and welcome! I haven't done an intro and will do that in a separate post down the line. I'm now thinking to add one about making extensions builds for browsers as it seems to be common issue.
Firefox amo has an automated process, but it only kicks in after initial approval. Of all the stores, amo is the best one tho as they maintain an irc server and presence at many places where you could talk to a live reviewer. I used to be a reviewer for them for several years.
For Opera, no changes are required in the extension, tho it may depend on how new API you are using is. The milage will vary, but Opera remains a strong browser in parts of Europe and Asia.
Safari, while it supported a few APIs, wasnt a place to submit your chrome extensions until the last wwdc where apple announced that there is 90% parity now in the APIs and provided a simple wrapper to convert extensions. I haven't tried it yet as it still requires Mac, xcode, and other apple paraphernalia.
Solid post, just want to add my 2 cents in.
In my experience Firefox manually reviewed my extensions. I wasn't asking for all_urls and other advanced permissions either.
It does have 2 upsides:
Thanks for this update! Porting to all the different browsers is a daunting task.
What also makes it more difficult (at least with Google) is the APIs to automate these steps are usually non-existent. Google generally has APIs for all products but for extensions you have to do tons of steps in the dev console. I have been able to setup automatic upload of a new version to the store but that is it.
I have played with this idea several times whereby I have a web app to create browser themes and then upload to the store and publish, but since publishing requires images and no way to programmatically upload images, it would require manual steps to complete so I have never finished this thought.
I've written an extension for the product I'm working on, and it works with Chrome, Opera, and Vivaldi.
What JS framework(s) have you used to build extensions?
What would be your advice for a newbie Indie hacker planning to get into building a business around a chrome extension?
I have made a Chrome extension in React. I published it in the Chrome Web Store and it was accepted with no problems. Feel free to use my code as a template.
Extensions are all js, html, css. You can use any tools you want to that will give you that output. At least for me, most extensions are really small maybe < 500 lines of code (usually 200-300 LOC), so writing one without a framework maybe perfectly reasonable.
I once tried building a react app, and then packaged the build output as an extension and submitted for review. It came back flagged as rejected because they thought it was suspicious - perhaps because of the webpack etc. so you are going to want to be mindful of this if/when using frameworks. Minification is fine but they do checks on it.
IMO the biggest difference to working with a web app, is that extensions have multiple parts:
Once you get a grasp of these different parts and how they work you will be good to go.
Thanks for sharing!
In the past several weeks I’m trying to develop an extension to support a web-application I’m working on, unfortunately it gets rejected time after time without my ability to understand how to fix it 😫
I’d be happy t chat if someone already know the tricks.
What is your concept and what do you get as feedback? Their feedback is very cryptic so maybe we can help you if you share more details.
Do you have other published items in the store? Building some reputation points might help also, though in general the approval process is very arbitrary.
Hi Neea thanks for the quick reply! appreciate it.
Yesterday I've received this:
"Item’s metadata does not accurately describe the function."
Not sure what it is, I've recently added Google Analytics and added Storage to the permissions.
But I'm new in this business so I guess it's my fault :)
I do not have a reputation in the store yet.
This is the Git repo - https://github.com/hagai-tz/paragraph-chrome-extension
I'm trying to investigate it at the moment.
Thanks! would try the CLI.
I am reading that feedback to mean that the store description is not matching with the functionality of the extension. Couple of things you might want to consider:
Extension has to be single purpose. You have to be able to clearly describe what this one thing is that the extension does. I see in you manifest you have: "Paragraph is a web application that helps users learn English while reading the daily news." which sounds more like a description of a larger web app; not the extension. Focus on describing what the extension adds to the experience. The single purpose goal is really a fine line/grey area, there are some faqs here and here.
I was looking at your source code and from what I gathered is clicking the extension action button launches a website. That might be an issue regarding this policy:
Also another small note is instead of requesting
tabspermission, see ifactiveTabis sufficient. If it is sufficient for the feature you are implementing you must use it overtabs.:) what a champ. Thanks Neea for the detailed response.
All of the above are good points I should address, I'll take a look on it now.
Thanks for the heads up with this sentence. It's exactly what I'm doing, and it might caused the problems. Hmm I should look in to it also.
"Functionality: Do not post an extension with a single purpose of installing or launching another app, theme, webpage, or extension."
I'll keep you posted here.
Have a great day!
Hagai
So eventually what I did is writing back to their email, say I don't understand why it's not getting approved and they approved it.
LOL yeah -- the approval process is very arbitrary. Glad it worked out!
Using google analytics within an extension is fine BTW I use it also.
Just went through the open source project, looks promising 💫 would try to rebuild the app using your the CLI.
Thanks for making this portal! How long has the Pending Review process taking in Chrome for you nowadays? Currently I am at the ~48 hr mark for an extension I wrote - definitely thought it would only take 2-3 hours to get through.
If its that long, chances are, your plugin got flagged for a manual review. I've written about it here if want to check it out.
Basically, if you're using permissions which you're extension is not using OR if you're using permissions like<all_urls> your extension will get reviewed manually. It used to take a week for this process but when lockdowns hit the US, this process started taking 3+ weeks. I'm not sure atm but that process seems to be nearly back to 1 week now.
Thanks, this is what I suspected, especially after hearing other comments here.
I read that reviews could take a long time based on the permissions so I did ensure my manifest permissions only matched on the URL my extension leverages, instead of <all_urls>, which is why Im surprised Im still at the two day mark.
I sent in a ticket, hopefully that speeds it up.
@shash7 How do i downgrade the dashboard so I dont use v2 going forward? That is a tip I have not heard before.
@JayGoingForGold There is a small popup/box in the bottom left corner that you can use to downgrade to the old dashboard.
Ah, sweet, I had to hit Show More to get that. I'll use the old dashboard here on out. Looks like my Pending Review is in orange text which seems to usually indicate manual review - hopefully this doesn't take 3 weeks.
Sounds good. If it helps, know that even extensions backed by big companies like hunter get stuffed in the review process.
Keep us posted with the ticket outcome.
FWIW, took about 36 hrs total. No reply to my ticket submission so not sure if it wouldve taken 36 hrs anyway, or if my ticket was looked at and pushed through. Overall pretty good though.
Good to know, always satisfying to see that pending status go away.
When it's pending for a long time that is not a good sign.
I do not time it but typically some hours < 6. I published last week and it was same day approval.
Hi Jay, I tried several times and it never took more than 3 hr i guess.
Good stuff man! Happy to see a fellow extension dev :)
same :)
Eh how is this on the front page LOL I was posting to a tiny group
I want to know what are your extensions!
this is my claim to fame, haha. It has the most users by a magnitude. The other ones not so much, so they may not be very solid ideas.
Haha +80.000 users! That's great. Great idea, I will have it in mind if I need it sometime.
Thanks for sharing your open sourced project - looks promising. Added to my favorites to check it out.
@neea - I would love to have a conversation with you. I am a Noob, and could really use some advise from someone as experienced you are!
any time, DM me on twitter
Thanks!