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20 Comments

What is your extension business model?

what is your extension business model ? anyone making real money with free extensions ?

  1. 3

    Interesting question. What should a browser do to help extension devs with building a biz model?

    Just joined this community. Am from Microsoft Edge team, looking at engaging with devs who build or want to build for Edge Addons Store. Still learning about this world, so pardon me for any noob questions.

    1. 1

      Hi,

      I have moved two of my extension to edge store. Is there a way to see daily install count and users? What is the process to be selected as an editor pick?

      Weather
      Url Shortener

      1. 1

        I am really sorry that I did not respond to this. I only login to IH if I get an email notification for responses to my comments here. But I did not receive any notification for this.

        Anyways to answer your query, please get in touch with the team via https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/extensions-chromium/publish/contact-extensions-team

        I am also sharing this post with my team, so that they can respond to this in more detail.

  2. 2

    I have made many free extensions in the past. That has never resulted in anything even though I include support link. Meh. I have now started charging and made my first freemium extension. I disable anything beyond basic functionality until user pays. Anyone who upgrades, great. If people do not upgrade, then it's fine also; at least I won't spend time on something that yields no return over time. Will see how it goes after some time.

  3. 2

    Making real money yes, but very few :)

    Business model for my In My Pocket addon is purely donation-based, and I'm not being obnoxious about this. The main thing I do is that at every major addon upgrade, a notification is shown redirecting to my website where there's a very visible "help me" green button, leading to donation page. Also, the mozilla addon store is showing a "Contribute" button leading to a donation page too.

    1. 1

      interesting. i wonder what is the avg % of this model, how many users are likely to donate if the product is useful. Do you know of any research in the space ?

      1. 2

        Not really, no. If that can help, I've had between 10k and 20k daily active users for the past 4 years, and received ~50 donations in 2.5 years I've given users the ability to do it.

        1. 1

          thanks for sharing this details.

  4. 1

    If your extension is completely free, your options are limited to donations or some sort of affiliate/retail partnership (Honey). I like what Dark Reader does where they partnered with Honey to promote them and they take donations. I would like to know how much Dark Reader makes from their partnership with Honey.

    The model I used for my Weather Extension is a one time upgrade to unlock pro features. This works well when the extension is for the masses. I think most people are willing to pay once for a weather extension but not monthly.

    For my Link Shortener Extension, I created my own shortener service T.LY that has monthly plans. This has worked well. People are able to use the extension for free but pay for additional url shortening features.

  5. 1

    My plan is to do a subscription for power users. It could be tough to execute, but I like that the business model aligns with creating a great user experience.

  6. 1

    My own business model, at the moment at least, is affiliate based. That said, the addons themselves are basic scrapers that route data into database and retrieval of contents is done thru visiting the web site. You can check it out yourself at https://share-a-cart.com

    1. 1

      Very interesting. two questions; I know amazon affiliate program is very problematic with extensions - how did you manage to keep your affiliate program alive ?

      Is Walmart affiliate worth it ?

      Great product btw.

      1. 1

        AA is indeed very problematic with addons and I didn't keep it alive -- at the moment, its removed from the system, tho I intend to research ways around that. Amazon is extremely popular and it was a very lucrative source of income while it was running.

        Walmart is popular as well but its a distant second to AA. If I had to guess, for every 100 orders form AA, Walmart gets 5.

        1. 1

          Curious what happened. Did amazon just remove you from the program? Did they detect traffic was coming from your extensions?

          1. 1

            AA, the amazons affil program, has a "strict" set of rules called operations agreement. Its in quotes because its structured to be both obscure and a way for Amazon to tell the affiliate partners they don't like to fuck off. My account has been terminated after about 10 months of operations, official reason:

            You are intercepting, recording, redirecting, reading, interpreting, or filling in the contents of any electronic form or other material submitted to us by any person or entity.

            Honestly, its very hard to understand what they mean here in the context of the tech product. I used AA in a legit way only -- all traffic thru the site was tagged and routed to them, and any traffic from extension wasn't tagged, but reaching or talking to anyone inside Amazon (just like any big tech corp) is not possible. Funnily, the only appeals process that exists for them is emailing [email protected] 🤣.

            1. 1

              That is funny that they want you to email jeff :) Curious if you tried lol. I wonder how sites like camelcamelcamel get away with it. They send emails which is suppose to be against their tos. They do redirect to their site for a few seconds and attach affiliate but that seems like it would get them banned. I would imagine its like most things, if you are big enough they make exceptions.

              1. 1

                Of course I tried, but that didn't change anything for me =(

                And I dunno how others get away with it either, that said, there are lots of ways to screw with amazon, but I'm not at that point yet

        2. 1

          thanks for sharing this insight. What alternative business model would you implement if affiliate goes down ?

  7. 1

    There aren't many ways to monetize extensions. Most I'm aware of are an extension of whatever the base saas offers, like most of the seo/research ones, see mix, etc.

    Then there are others that charge a one time fee or a subscription for the addon itself. There are great many of these, from themes, to weather add-ons and so on.

    Another way is monetization with advertising and affiliate injection in various ways. These are iffy because stores don't like them as they may break the one main point policy, but there's a ton of these as well.

    Finally there are companies that pay addon developers to include their scripts in the addons. Same issue as ad/affiliate, but these exist.

    1. 1

      thanks for sharing this information.

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