ExtensionPay

Take secure payments in browser extensions

No Employees
Founders Code
Solo Founder
B2B
Marketplaces
Payments
SaaS

Monetize Chrome extensions with ExtensionPay! Google killed Chrome Web Store payments in 2021, making it tedious to charge for browser extensions. I made ExtensionPay to lower the barrier to making profitable extensions.

February 7, 2022 +$25000 — 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 $25,000 with ExtensionPay!

💰Revenue stayed constant from last month, around $240.

📝 +53 new signups this month to 422 total.

⚙️ New app features: None

📈 Marketing: New content article Add Stripe Payments to Chrome Extensions. Submitted ExtensionPay to Mozilla Extension Workshop. Tweaked SEO and landing page more.

Reflections

Not a whole lot to report this month. Mostly new marketing efforts which are in-motion but haven't panned out one way or another yet.

Revenue was flat again which is nice since a lot of that is one-time sales that tend to fall off over time, which means new extensions have been making up the gaps to keep revenue constant. Hopefully that trend continues.

I automated a few things so that I spend less time on ExtensionPay day-to-day since working for basically any amount of time on it right now seems to be detrimental to my health. I'm not sure what this means for my $1k/month goal for this year — maybe I'll shelf that goal for now.

I'm excited that one of my friends is monetizing his extension with ExtensionPay. I think it will be quite profitable for both of us.

It's very interesting running a SaaS business. The work never feels "done" — there are always customers to support, new marketing efforts that could be tried, new features to add. I'm not sure I like that feeling or know how to handle it in a healthy way yet. Right now it just creates waves of desire but I haven't found a way to make it something I work on habitually.

January 7, 2022 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 :)

December 7, 2021 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.

November 8, 2021 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 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 $12,000 with ExtensionPay!

💰Revenue increased over the past month to around $150 per month as new extensions start making money.

📝 +45 new signups this month.

⚙️ No new app features

📈 No new marketing efforts

Reflections:

Growth! It's cool that ExtensionPay has grown a little without doing any serious work on it. I mostly just make sure current customers are happy, answering emails and fixing things here and there.

Even though there are so many ways I know it could be better, I also feel really satisfied where it is for now while I focus on my meditation practice and well-being. My health is improving very rapidly now which makes me very happy!

October 7, 2021 Over $9000! — Payments in browser extensions

💰Developers have now made over $9000 with ExtensionPay!

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

Updates:

💰Revenue increased slightly over the past month. Still around $100 / month.

📝 234 signups in total now. Most seem to come from Google, Indie Hackers, and a handful of other sources.

⚙️ App changes:

  • Updated the landing page with social proof and a flat monthly plan. Ended up removing the flat monthly plan option because I think it may have scared people off.
  • Launched on r/sideproject. Very little traffic but a good way to test the waters for bigger launches.
  • Added a password reset for developers to log in.

Reflections:

Steady as she goes! It was again a pretty light month for ExtensionPay without a huge amount of growth or features added. I feel okay with this for now.

There are a few features that many customers have requested that are no-brainers to do next. They'll take a bit of work because they touch every part of the app, but the service will be much more valuable after they're done.

September 2, 2021 MV3 support! — Payments in browser extensions

I finally added support for Manifest v3! This is the new webextension standard from Google that's already implemented in Chrome. Lots of people have asked when ExtensionPay is going to support MV3 so I finally looked into it and made it happen — only took a day!

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

Other updates:

💰Developers have now made about $7000 through ExtensionPay!

📝 180 signups in total with a new one every handful of days. This seems to have slowed down a bit recently.

📑 I wrote more content articles: How to Monetize Chrome Extensions, How to Add Free Trials in Chrome Extensions, ExtensionPay is the Chrome Web Store Payments Replacement

Reflections:

I decided to prioritize my health and meditation for the past month so haven't really done all that much with ExtensionPay but I feel like that was a bit of a mistake. It's hard to find a healthy balance for all this stuff!

It doesn't seem like the content marketing has done all that much for SEO — I get a few visits on average from Google per day. I'm not really sure how to improve this — I think I need to reach out to the IndieHackers community for help.

I'm happy that revenue has been relatively steady but I definitely want this to go up. I'm hoping that adding MV3 support will get more people to sign up and release their extensions which will eventually increase revenue.

August 11, 2021 Devs have made over $5000 with ExtensionPay!

ExtensionPay crossed a neat milestone recently: browser extension developers have made over $5000 using ExtensionPay. A lot of that has been in the past month, too as more developers have started using the service. We have over 150 developers signed up at this point with new ones coming in organically every few days.

For those who aren't following along, ExtensionPay lets browser extension developers easily take payments in their extensions, saving weeks of tedious work. It's open-source, works cross-browser, and is free to sign up.

$5000 is great! I'm happy people have found it useful and made some real money. But even with my 5% cut that means I've only made $250 total. Making any money online is amazing, but my goal with the project is to get it to ramen profitability which means making about $1000 per month. Currently that's a long way off.

My plan to get to ramen profitability is to market better and experiment with the pricing. To market better I want to rank on the first page of Google for a key search term. That would significantly boost qualified traffic to the site. I'm no SEO expert but I'm doing my best with content marketing and getting a couple visits from Google a day.

To experiment with the pricing I've been thinking about adding different plans on top of the existing 5% plan that would significantly lower the transaction fee and add a fixed monthly subscription cost to increase my MRR. The thing is, even though the 5% fee is a lot for some folks, for other folks it's perfectly reasonable. If possible I'd like to segment my users on this somehow because I think a 5% fee is often more lucrative than a monthly plan. These customers vaguely fall into the category "can't be arsed to make my own payment system" so it ends up being really valuable to them, but I'm not sure how I could segment them into their own plan. Hmm!

July 22, 2021 More revenue! — Payments for browser extensions

Things have been going! Stats:

💰Over $100 in revenue in the last 30 days! This is starting to feel like real money! It's not clear this trend will continue since one extension with one-time payments is responsible for a good amount of this revenue and those tend to trail off over time, but we'll see!

📝 134 signups in total with a new one every few days. Pretty good, but I'd love to start getting more users.

ℹ️ For those who aren't following along, ExtensionPay lets browser extension developers easily take payments in their extensions, saving weeks of tedious work. It's open-source, works cross-browser, and is free to sign up. ℹ️

📑 I wrote a content marketing article: How to Monetize Chrome Extensions with ExtPay. I'd like to rank on Google for "monetize chrome extension" which seems to get the most traffic in this space. Any tips for this would be helpful.

• I just implemented proper free trials since a few developers that haven't launched their extensions were asking for them. I hope adding this feature will get them to release their extensions and start making money.

🎥 A Youtuber made a video about using ExtensionPay.

June 21, 2021 100 signups! — Payments for browser extensions

It feels like ExtensionPay has started to get some traction! Lots of people are signing up organically without me having to reach out via emails. The top traffic sources are IndieHackers, organic Google searches, Hacker News / Reddit comments, the official Chrome extension mailing list, and Github. If anyone would like to help me out, starring the project on Github would be really great.

ℹ️ For those who aren't following along, https://extensionpay.com lets browser extension developers take payments in their extensions without needing to code their own backend server, saving weeks of tedious work. It's open-source, works cross-browser, and is free to sign up. ℹ️

I've also started content marketing — here's my first post about browser extensions by Indie Hackers that make money.

Unfortunately the revenue for ExtensionPay is still very low with a lot of it coming from only a handful of extensions, but honestly I'm still quite happy with that. It feels really cool that money is coming in steadily and would keep on like that even if I stopped working on it completely. And of course I don't plan to stop working on it. :)

My goal for ExtensionPay is to reach ramen profitability — $500 per month would be really good and $1000 a month would make me ecstatic. Eventually I think ExtensionPay has the potential to make over $100k per year, but that feels like it's at least 3-5 years out if I do things right.

Onward!

April 20, 2021 50 Signups! — Payments in browser extensions

Crossed the 50 signup mark!

➡️ For those who aren't following along, ExtensionPay lets browser extension developers take payments in their extensions without needing to run their own backend server, saving weeks of tedious work. It works cross-browser, is open-source, and is free to sign up. ⬅️

In the past couples weeks I've been marketing here on IndieHackers, on the official Chrome extension mailing list, on the Mozilla browser extension dev forum, in a browser extension slack group, and direct outreach to Chrome extension developers that used Chrome web store payments. Not a lot of signups came from these sources which was a little disappointing, but so it goes!

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Monetize Chrome extensions with ExtensionPay! Google killed Chrome Web Store payments in 2021, making it tedious to charge for browser extensions. I made ExtensionPay to lower the barrier to making profitable extensions.