More growth! — Payments in browser extensions

For those who aren't following along, ExtensionPay lets browser extension developers take payments for their extensions without a backend or any up-front costs, saving money and weeks of tedious work. It's open-source, works for all browsers, and is free to sign up and use.

Updates:

💰Developers have now made over $15,000 with ExtensionPay!

💰Revenue increased AGAIN over the past month to around $220.

📝 +40 new signups this month to 319 total.

⚙️ New app features: Free trial user dashboard for developers to see free trial information for their users. Also added translation support to the payment and subscription pages.

📈 Marketing: In talks with Google to feature ExtensionPay in the official extension docs! Also posted to r/chrome_extensions since they now allow self promotion.

Reflections:

Some interesting developments! Increased revenue is nice but I'm not sure if it will continue to grow.

I got a new customer who agreed to pay a monthly fee before I developed Portuguese translation support for them (they did the actual translation). This felt like a nice solution to the problem of new customers demanding features and potentially wasting my time if they don't end up using the service or bringing in revenue. In this particular case, the up-front money was nice and now ExtensionPay can support any other translations I might want to do.

Talking to Google is really exciting but also a little scary — I'd expect ExtensionPay would get a LOT more traffic which might also increase the feeling of pressure to develop it more. I'm a little leery of this kind of pressure, especially given my health issues, but it's also an amazing opportunity.

I also spent some time this month playing with SvelteKit. My current stack is a custom-made server/client setup based on early versions of SvelteKit. I really really like the way my stack works — it removes basically all boilerplate while providing a very fast and optimized app for users, but it has some jank/technical debt that is starting to get messy. Mainly the startup time in development and production is very slow and I can't import any code on the client-side which means copying and pasting a lot of code. SvelteKit fixes all this and more, but it's not quite how I want my app to work by default and it's still in beta. I think I'm going to spend a little time switching to it anyway because it's (a) fun and (b) will greatly improve my quality of life when developing. I already got it working how I want in a prototype and even used it to make a custom form component that will remove a ton of unnecessary code in my app and make developing new features even simpler.

I always question whether spending time on technical/engineering tasks is worthwhile since they usually don't have much of a direct impact on revenue which is higher priority for me. But in this case I enjoyed the process of getting everything to work and it will help me in the future for sure.