The first low code extension builder!
After months of Zoom + VSCode two friends (Will, James) and I are finally ready to share extension.dev with the world 🎉
The first low-code extension builder! It's free forever, just head over to extension.dev and click "Add to Chrome."
We've read countless indiehacker posts on extensions, from learning about Poshmark and Closet Tools to monetizing extensions. And we are excited to put our own story into the mix.
Our obsession with extensions started while we were still in college. Our senior year, we built a simple Chrome extension that would automatically click the "enroll" button at midnight so students could get the classes they wanted. Little did we expect over 500 students to download our extension and spam the "enroll" button at midnight...
The class enrolling server went down.
A month later, we were called into the office of the head of IT at Stanford. They had figured out what had caused the crash and they were not happy.
Since this first experience, we've fallen in love with the idea of extensions. Extensions allow end users to customize and tweak the websites they use every day, with or without permission.
We believe that everyone should be able to make software work for them. extension.dev is our way of making it easier for anyone to customize their tools.
I have been requesting that someone on this site make this for almost a year now! Finally glad to see it up.
After checking it out a bit I have a question. Would all of the users of my extension need to download your chrome extension to be able to run the extension I make through your app?
Exporting extensions and uploading them to the store is in the roadmap! I can keep you posted if you are interested.
Hi! Yeah, the reason for this is so that you can deploy your extensions over the air to your users without finicking with the Chrome store. (Similar to Userscripts)
And outside of company use, extension.dev will stay free forever.
Yeah, I'd like that, keep me posted. Also, what is company use defined as. If my extension makes money?
No, company use is when you want to securely deploy extensions internally within a company you work at.
During beta, this plan is also free.
Awesome! Thanks!
Does this let me create extensions and publish on the chrome store?
That is coming in the roadmap! Right now we are focused on making it easy for developers to create and share extensions with their teammates without having to finick with the Chrome Store.
Awesome. I'm interested in this space as well after looking at retool. Do you have any relevant links/resources to learn more about the potential and trends in internal tools?
Thanks for asking! We actually spent a while researching internal extensions at enterprises. Here is our findings
https://dev.to/realkevinyang/what-i-learned-from-studying-100-internal-chrome-extensions-a7n
It's awesome kevin, Curious to know how you're planning to monetize it? And what your tech stack?
Thank you! We are planning to monetize when developers want to build custom extensions for their company. Not sure what we will charge yet. We are still focused on getting the first few companies successful!
Outside of workplace use, we want to keep the platform free forever (kinda like userscripts).
Great
Oh completely missed the tech stack question. The extension is built with React using Iframes to embed the FE in other websites. Building with Webpack and our server is half Hasura half Node.
Super cool idea! Nice work guys and congrats on the launch :)
Thanks for the kind words Matthew!
| Since this first experience, we've fallen in love with the idea of extensions. Extensions allow end users to customize and tweak the websites they use every day, with or without permission.
This ❤️
Yeah!! :)