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Comment by keraf | Hacker News Reader

NoCoin author here. With approx 700k users across 3 browsers, I have obviously received many emails for purchasing my extension. I have never accepted to sell my project, even when I had some low financial moments, because my intent was never to make money with it. And it being an open source project, it belongs to the community. I would also feel like I am breaching the trust of my users if I decide to hand it over to an unknown party. I always look up at the exemplar integrity of VLC maintainer @jbk [0].

Regarding the monetization of NoCoin, I advertise the fact that I am accepting donations in the description of the extension and have links on the GitHub page. There is also a button to donate directly on the Firefox add-ons page. Almost all donations came from the Firefox Add-ons store. I guess if Google would do the same on the Chrome store, developers would get more donations?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15372048

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If I'm not too intrusive, what's the average offer an extension like yours receives for selling it?

I’m the author of JSON Formatter [1] with 989,000 users.

I probably get a couple of offers a year for it. Of those that have offered specific sums, they ranged from from $10-20k. I always reject them, because it’s pretty obvious they want to turn it into malware.

I’ve had a couple of cases where I felt they went to some effort to schmooze me first, presenting themselves as having benign intentions, almost like a carefully crafted con. But as far as I can tell, there is no legitimate, ethical reason to want to acquire it, and I won’t sell out my users like that.

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/json-formatter/bcj...

$20k seems like a pretty lowball offer? Close to 1M users (plus potential for further growth) and you have me expecting at least $400k... Or, am I expecting too much?

There isn't potential for further growth if it gets bought. They just want to serve malware to the existing userbase.

That is still $0.02 per user. Not a bad deal.

JSON Formatter is more aimed at technical users. I wonder if an extension with 1M less technical users would next higher.

I feel like the rate is determined by the market and/or the profit model of the buyer.

So a) there are other extension authors with similar coverage who are selling out and/or b) they can't turn a reasonable profit at a higher price.

how do you suggest to make those 400k back in any reasonable amount of time?

I publish an extension on the store of Chrome with 1+ million of (technical) users. Three years ago, someone proposed me to buy it for 50,000 USD. He clearly indicated that he was interested by the user base...

I was never curious enough to read the offers, I just bin those emails. As said, this project was never about being profitable and I am already very grateful for the donations I received.

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