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Comment by purple-leafy | Hacker News Reader

I think more solo developers should build chrome extensions.

Why? Because as a full-time developer wanting to do a side-project, you need to build what you can in a short time frame, with minimal maintenance, and without worrying about hosting costs.

And you actually want users and minimal marketing.

These are the smallest true solo dev projects you can build I think.

I’ve built 10 in the last year (mostly for fun) monetised one, and have a flagship extension I’ve just released that I expect to do well [0]

Ask me anything about chrome extension development!

Though that being said, API-only is also a good gig.

[0] - https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/design-copilot/hgal...

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A second question - must be your biggest newest fan sorry - how do you know which extensions will get approved?

I built 4 and applied with 3. 2 got rejected and at the time (3-6 years back) the rules and reasons were not very clear. One was rejected for "doing multiple things" which I understand is in the rules, but those things were e.g. to translate/save transcript for highlighted text, in my opinion, pretty related. The other rejection made sense when I reread the rules.

Have you had 10/10 accepted?

That’s okay I love discussing extensions!

Most extensions get approved, I’ve had some quite complex extensions be approved as long as you can define their “single purpose”. I’ve even had YouTube ad blockers/Google ad-blockers approved. Honestly from what you’ve shared I’d expect your extension to be easily approved.

Extensions that request permissions they don’t need won’t get approved.

Lately though, extensions that modify the default search experience won’t get approved

So far I’m 10 for 10 in terms of acceptance, but one extension I made that had auth did not get approved initially as the auth library was calling remote code/doing remote code execution which isn’t allowed anymore. I ended up just removing the auth lol.

If you ever have an idea feel free to message me if you want to understand if it would be accepted or not, and how to plan. Free of course! My “business” email is hello “at” papillon software “dot” dev

Thank you for your response! That is valuable, I will note that down. Ah this might be it. I was doing auth and imported react too (following a tutorial on firebase + react in extensions) about 4 years ago (~2020 winter). How do you manage to keep track of credits or make money if your extensions don't have auth then, though? Send users to results pages which are on your site?

I haven’t run into a case where I need to track credits, but if I had to track a subscription status there are a few ways to do auth - but it is harder in extensions

I usually get users to bring their own api keys etc

Wanna grab a virtual coffee? I have built some chrome extensions as well since recently. It’s fun! It would be fun to spar about extensions.

My email is in my profile.

Hey there id love to! I’ll send you an email today :) thanks for reaching out!

I'm someone with a weakness for design (luckily, my other half is the opposite). I was so excited to try gpt-4-turbo and others in their vision mode to try and get design feedback.

Some was ok. But I soon realised, the key feed back, was about the content or amount of content/actions in relation to the rest of the app.

I have tried feeding in multiple steps as images. This hasn't really helped (maybe it's too complicated)

The overall journey of the user seems to be the most important part. If they slow down at one stage, it reduces their enthusiasm.. and a great later design only feels good

Is there any way your tool in the future could do that? More to the point, and very much an anti-thesis of your starting with an extension here, the use case I see is connecting this with screen recorders of users to analyze, which would be the opposite of an extension. But much more useful for me. I have thousands of sessions a day; tens of errors. I can't watch them all (and stay sane - I suppose I could watch moments before users purchase, but that's weird).

Any thoughts?

The way I get around these issues is atomic design feedback, so my tool allows you to select a rectangle area, and when I use my tool I basically select a component sized area and get feedback component-by-component

Do you have a good way to modify contenteditable divs from the extension? I'm working on one and we're having a hell of a time trying to come up with One Way to do input updates but everyone's contenteditables behave slightly differently.

Like I just want to be able to ask

* what is the content of this input field

* what is the selected text in the field

* please replace the content of the field with this new content

but the API there is really rough and there's tons of edge cases. Is there some library you use?

Hmm this isn’t something I’ve dealt with before, what kind of sites are you targeting? Wordpress sites? I ask because you mention “div” but are talking about input fields

You would probably use a content script and set world to “MAIN” and search for the contenteditable attribute on first guess

I’m targeting any input fields. So like, standard input boxes like HN, but also weird input fields like a google doc or notion page.

Thanks for sharing!

Speaking about chrome extensions reminded me of this nice project I saw recently, in case you find useful!

Can you link it here?

Sorry I'm dumb: https://github.com/PlasmoHQ/plasmo

That’s cool, I’ve never used plasmo! I rolled my own build step with React/Vite and TypeScript

I think I’m going to build a light competitor as a learning exercise

I've heard people voice the opinion that browser extensions are uniquely difficult to actually monetize. Moreso than SAAS/mobile apps, etc. because users are accustomed to extensions being simple and free with the exception of a very select few (Grammarly)

Thoughts?

Yes they can be tough to monetise, but I also think they are an underserved niche.

Think about it - most extensions are crap, they look crap, and they are buggy. So if you can build something halfway decent you’re already in the top 10% of extension developers

I have been looking into building chrome extensions lately.

I have a question and my question is how do you make money out of this and how do you market your extension

You build a web service that makes money and offer a browser extension that hooks into that service.

As far as I can tell, there’s not a good way to monetize a browser extension directly.

Could you share some ideas or pointers on how to monetize an extension?

Also, probably a dumb question but what stops other developers to reverse engineer your extension and release a clone?

I’m yet to monetise an extension (I will soon) so still figuring that out.

In terms of reverse engineer/clones you can get them DMCA’d if they straight up copy your code.

If your extension is complex you can use cloud functions/server-less functions to handle some parts of your extension

That or integrations/apps for SaaS app stores and marketplaces. Think Salesforce apps, Shopify apps, etc

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