What's the best way to beta test a chrome extension?

by HankC

I'm new to the chrome extension development world. I have an extension and a list of people that are willing to beta test it for me in return for feedback.

The plan is to charge a monthly fee to users, but I'm wondering how you transition people from the beta version to the paid version.

Anyone have any advice on this?

HankC

posted to

Browser Extension Makers

on January 29, 2021

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I should plug my own project here which allows you to take payments in your extension without needing to run your own server: https://extensionpay.com/ It's pretty easy to integrate and there's no copying and pasting license keys or any nonsense like that. Just open the payment popup and when the person pays their features are immediately enabled.

Glench

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5 years ago
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  Looks interesting @Glench. I see you've plans to build out a feature that supports subscription plans in the future. This is the road I intend to go down so will keep an eye on your progress for sure.
  
  HankC
  
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  5 years ago
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    yep! should be done in a 2-3 weeks. I'll email you when it's out
    
    Glench
    
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    5 years ago
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There are a couple of ways via CWS store. The simplest is to run an "unlisted" visibility for your testers. When you upload and create new item on CWS, this option is in "Pricing & distribution" tab. Unlisted means that you need to supply the link to the users for the addon.

The other option is "private" and its the same idea, except you'd also need to set up a list of trusted testers. You can find how it works in CWS as well.

Soft_Re

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5 years ago
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  For the private option you can also use google group. I find this to be more manageable approach if the number of testers is large.
  
  neea
  
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  5 years ago
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  Thanks @Soft_Re. I've uploaded it as Unlisted and have sent it onto a few people.
  
  I guess I'm wondering what's the smoothest way to transition people onto a paid plan, but perhaps a nice-to-have problem that I can deal with if the feedback is good!
  
  HankC
  
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  5 years ago
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That depends on your back-end, there's some alternatives, like:
- if you already have some flag for the next paid users, you could set that flag to all your test users, this is only the ase if you hace all needed to run the paid version
- if you dont know how to handle your next paid users but you want to launch your product to a public market, then you could create a list for your existing users and whenever you are ready to lauch the paid version, run a migration or script to set your test users to paid
- if your test users are not registered on your database, then the only way to do that is asking them to register your application, ti could be by following a sign up form which is going to be used by your future paid users
- also if you dont want to register any user at all, then you could handle that the "adobe" way, with paid tokens, a user paid for your product, you give them a token, the user enters the token into your product
What's your extension?
VictorGonz

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5 years ago
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What I've done with beta users is to send them the packaged extension, with instructions as to how they can load it unpacked. My extension is free but with this approach you could get away with only supporting a single (paid) version on the Store.

Note also that you can read the manifest data from inside your extension, so you can also gate things based on version strings.

tconfrey

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5 years ago
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  Clever idea @tconfrey. A few more steps on the user side of things but it may be worth it.
  
  I was unaware you could gate things based on the version. I'll have to have a look into that (or if you know of any particularly good resources would be great to hear!)
  
  HankC
  
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  5 years ago
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