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16 Comments

Monetizing Chrome Extension

Hey fellow chrome extension developers.

I'm working on my first chrome extension, and just curious as to how you guys are monetizing yours.

I know the chrome store has an option for people to purchase your extension, but from what I've seen, the most common way is to utilize a monthly subscription format instead, or just add a "donation" button.

How are you guys monetizing it?

If you're using the monthly subscription method, how are you doing it? Are you adding in the logic inside the extension, or does chrome have a built-in method for monthly subscription payments?

Thanks guys

  1. 4

    I have two popular extension. Weather and Link Shortener and they both are free with paid upgrade. Weather has a one time purchase to upgrade to Pro and Link Shortener has a monthly subscription to T.LY. I recommended not using googles built in payment system unless you only plan to release the extension to Chrome. I try to get all my extensions to work for as many browsers as possible and want one payment system. So for me it is best to build my own upgrade system using Stripe.

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      Thanks for your input!

      So you would set up like the regular user registration & login inside your extension, to differentiate the user between a free plan and upgraded plan?

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        There’s multiple ways you could do it. Simplest option is how I do it for my weather extension. Click a link to upgrade from extension that goes to webpage. Users pays 1 time upgrade and there account is upgraded. Each user has a unique Id and that is how my server knows who has paid.

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          Ah I see. So the unique ID is obtained from the user's google account? Or is there a separate registration & login / account management going on, to assign the user a unique ID?

          1. 1

            It depends on your extension. When a user installs Weather, it calls my API to create a unique id, and the extension stores that id. All future API calls include that unique id is used as an identifier. When a user upgrades, the same id is used to track that they upgraded.

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              So the unique id is stored in the chrome extension local storage right?

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                  Isn't there a danger if the user clears their local storage? Wouldn't that cause issues with mapping the unique ID to the right user?

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                    Yes that is a possibility. I do email them a key to reactivate their pro features and this limits support emails.

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                      Cheers for answering all my questions. That was really helpful!

            2. 1

              Ohh thats a great way to auto-register the user! Didn't even think of doing something like that

  2. 1

    I have two extension GroupsBuddy and BlurwebApp i am directly selling for monetisation.

  3. 1

    Hey Alexandros 👋 this is very much experimental for me at this point, but we recently launched a browser extension Obie and are monetizing via Stripe in-app (number of search queries). To the best of my knowledge, there isn't any built -in methods Google offers for monetizing subscriptions.

    1. 1

      hey man! ohh okay cool I see. So you are treating it like any other web app, where users register & login inside the extension, to see if the user is using a free or upgraded plan?

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