A plan! — 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 this month:

💰Developers have now made over $20,000 with ExtensionPay!

💰My revenue stayed constant from last month, around $220

📝 +50 new signups this month to 369 total.

⚙️ New app features: A few bug fixes and now a form for developers to change the name of their extension (long time coming but it barely ever came up! 😂)

📈 Marketing: New content article Add Paid Licenses to Chrome Extensions. Tweaked SEO and fixed links.

Reflections

Not much new in app development, mostly focused on marketing and supporting current users with bug fixes / adding free users. I wrote a new content article, updated an old one, and started writing another new one. Still waiting to hear back from Google about the link from their official docs.

I revamped my internal admin dashboard to keep better stats and track new users better. Now, in addition to a welcome email, I also send a two-week follow-up for anyone that registers an extension to keep them in the pipeline. It doesn’t seem to have done much so far but it’s very quick to do so might as well. I also wrote a neat little extension that highlights the parts of websites that have changed since the last time you loaded the page — maybe I’ll release it at some point?

Revenue

Revenue stayed flat this month and my impression is that it’s been trending downward. Might be a holiday slump or might be that the one-time sale extensions that have been selling the most have saturated their market and are slowing down.

Goals

Maybe the most important thing that happened this month is that I decided to be a little more intentional with my plan for ExtensionPay. My goal this year is for ExtensionPay to make $1k/month.

To get there, I want to develop it to the point where I feel like I can release it on Product Hunt and Hacker News which should help obtain new users and get the word out a little. The features that feel required for me to post on these sites are PayPal support and allowing different plans within extensions. These features have been some of the most requested and are no-brainers — I think they’ll make the service more enticing for new users.

I also realized recently that it’s probably going to be difficult for ExtensionPay to grow its revenue. Most of the extensions so far are for one-time payments which have tended to drop off over time. Not only that, but extension prices tend to be low and with 5% transaction fees I’m usually not making much more than 50 cents per sale. Therefore it’s going to take a lot of sales to grow revenue significantly. I think 4x is reasonable but 20x or 40x (good full-time salaries) seems a little dubious.

Realizing this, I think it makes sense for me to additionally start thinking about new sources of revenue outside of ExtensionPay. Ideally I’d like it to be B2B and have recurring revenue. I'm pretty sure I know what that's going to be but I'll keep that to myself for now :)