How to take payments in browser extensions

I've made browser extensions before but it's such a pain to take payments in them — it's weeks of tedious work, especially now that the Chrome Web Store payments system is gone.

To help myself and others not have to do that work I made ExtensionPay. It easily let's you take one-time or recurring subscription payments in browser extensions. It's open-source, secure, works cross-browser, integrates with Stripe, and is free to sign up.

Using ExtensionPay in an extension is pretty straightforward — just drop the open-source JS library into your code and use the extpay.getUser() function to tell whether a user is paid and the extpay.openPaymentPage()when the user is ready to pay. It makes it pretty easy to create any of payment system you want — free trial, premium, freemium, and more.

And before anyone objects with "extensions can't make any money!" or "no one pays for extensions!" let me remind you that @jdnoc is one of the top solo founders on IndieHackers making $41k/month with a browser extension and there are several developers already making money every day with ExtensionPay :)

My hope is that ExtensionPay lowers the barrier to making profitable browser extensions and lets people try out ideas that they might not have tried because of all the work to take payments.

Extensions are an interesting platform — they're pretty easy to create (you often can just modify other sites to be more valuable instead of needing to make your own app), require no money to get started or ongoing server costs, get good organic marketing from the Chrome/Edge/Firefox add-on stores, and have a global market — everyone in the world is basically using only a few browsers.