Doing the impossible, monetising Chrome Extensions | Hacker News Reader

Doing the impossible, monetising Chrome Extensions

tillypay.com

13 pointsthomasisaac9 comments

I'm really troubled by the way that the author of this article nonchalantly describes wildly unethical means of monetising a browser extension, like cryptocurrency mining, search hijacking, and remote web proxying -- often even mentioning that they've tried these methods (yikes), or discussing how profitable they could be.

If you're writing an article about ways to make money, you don't list "robbery" or "kidnapping" as serious options. If you're writing an article about monetising software, you don't list techniques which abuse your users' trust (and which the vendor has banned) as options there, either.

The author is linking to one of their own projects as if it wasn't theirs :/

And as the creator of a competing service that allows browser extension makers to take payments in their extensions without needing a backend server (https://extensionpay.com), I know from my users that making money from extensions is far from "impossible" :)

I have a Chrome extension that has 1600+ users (very small number but did zero promotion to get there). It is currently completely free.

1. Is there a socially acceptable path to go from free to non-free?

2. How much can one reasonably expect to earn per user per month or year in your experience? (My extension is by no means mission critical but it solves a (simple) problem rather elegantly IMHO).

> 2. How much can one reasonably expect to earn per user per month or year in your experience? (My extension is by no means mission critical but it solves a (simple) problem rather elegantly IMHO).

There's no way to tell for sure! It really depends on the value the extension provides, your market, exposure and reviews on the Chrome store, etc.

I can say that one of the extensions that uses ExtensionPay is a really simple utility that allows switching between recently used tabs in Chrome (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/alt-%20-q-switch-r...) but users love it and it makes a surprising amount of money!

But all that is ultimately speculative for your extension. One reason I made ExtensionPay was to lower the barrier to making paid extensions enough so instead of speculating you could just try it out and see what happens!

> 1. Is there a socially acceptable path to go from free to non-free?

From what I've seen there will be a very loud but very small minority of users that will get angry and leave bad reviews. I think if you try to make these users happy (maybe by giving them free access?) and let the others know why you're asking them to pay then it will go alright. Here's what I wrote about charging for a previously-free JavaScript library: https://github.com/Glench/fuzzyset.js#license

Thanks! Very helpful!

Managing chrome extensions can be so annoying. I created a Chrome extension a couple of years ago, and the Chrome Webstore Dashboard was so annoying and non-maintained. The Chrome API's are quite nice though.

Your comment seems completely off topic to the article. In any case, you can use the Chrome Web Store Publish API and not bother with the UI of the Dashboard.

Yeah, your right, slightly off topic, just a bit frustrated with the chrome people just suddenly reporting problems or the fact that the dashboard is very old.

Didn't know about the Publish API, thanks for the suggestion will check it out.

I have a Chrome plugin with over 60k weekly active users. The only thing I can think to gain from it is a claim on the number of users of our products.

I sometimes dream of what a difference it would make if I could monetize it, but I see no viable path there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com