rogem002

I will ;)

For the duration it was open source and free, I saw little to nothing in the way of contributions.

I can totally understand where you're coming from & for the most part I always try to compensate people who contribute for there time.

If you've played around with extensions, you should definitely consider making a paid one. The APIs you need to verify payment are pretty interesting.

> Were the existing free users grandfathered in? It seems like it from the weekly users.

All user who had the extension installed when I made the switch were able to keep it for free. This was a little tricky for users who had installed, then uninstalled it. For those ones I just told them to email me for the developer version.

> Can you have two pricing models for the same extension?

You can't easily, but I did consider putting a lifetime version in the store as a separate extension.

That's correct, for things like CSS & images it'll reload the asset without a hard reload. For HTML & JS changes it'll do a hard reload.

I've definitely been curious as to how much the sales would change if I had made it closed sourced.

However I'm happy to take the loss in sales to enable technical enough users to be able to mess with the source code & (hopefully) send some code back to the repo ;)

That's interesting to hear. I'm thinking about experimenting with different prices next month, I'll make sure to do another write up :)

Awesome! What is your extension?

I did look at in-app payments, but because of how the extension is made to be used (click the button, it starts reloading when required) I couldn't figure out a decent way to ask users to upgrade without being annoying.

I went for subscription because I wanted a low price point (It's a simple extension, anything more then $5 seemed like I'd be asking to much), with the potential of having a passive income. I'd love to experiment with how one-off/monthly changes the amount of sales but for now I'm happy asking people to pay yearly.

I had one user message me complaining his all of clients websites would lag when he used the extension (It checks for changes to files by crudely polling them every 200ms or so). Turned out the guy was building sites via an FTP editor in a production with all his clients on one server, with a lot of CSS/JS files being included in each page.

After a few emails back and forth, I switched him to WAMP for local development.

I'd 100% push people towards offering an extension for free to build up a good amount of reviews & user base, then switching to any paid model (One off, Monthly Subscription or Annual Subscription). If people are happy to pay for something that was free, it's a good indictor that you've built something decent. I went for Annual Subscription because I felt it offered a fair price point ( < $5 a year per a user ) and it created an incentive for me to keep maintaining the extension. I'd recommend playing around and seeing what works best for your extension.

> Do you see any practical risk with someone offering a copied version of the extension

They're are already a bunch of extensions doing something similar for free. I like to think people have used my extension because I'm never more then an email away if they have any questions. Also as it's paid, I have no incentive to sell it to a 3rd party who might start injecting ads into webpages or something.

I wrote the extension and this blog post, so I'm happy to answer any follow up questions you might have :)

IMO jQuery is one more thing the end user has to download and process, the more stuff we can strip out while keeping the same user experience is a good thing.

Though I think most the people moving away from jQuery are doing it because the browsers have become more consistent in how they run JS.

I wrote something similar a few months back https://github.com/MikeRogers0/justdelete.me-chrome-extensio... for Just Delete Me, though they offered a nice JSON file for me to use.

> The way I'm going to use this list is to look up services before I sign up.

You should try the Chrome Extension https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/justdeleteme/hfpof... I wrote using the JustDelete.me data. It adds a traffic light to the omnibar indicating if the site is hard to be deleted off.

I changed my password to something difficult to memorise which was stored in an online password vault. The result was it took an extra 20 seconds to login, which proved to be a very effective way to stop using facebook.

Did you even watch past the first 30 seconds of the video?

If it's ok, here is mine as well https://github.com/MikeRogers0/LivePage

It monitors the HTML/CSS then reloads the page when something has changed. I made it when I was a full time front end developer, it still needs a lot of love but it does the job.

The default subreddits have suffered from an eternal september, if you unsubscribe from them & find the more niche subreddits it gets a lot better.

While this is an option, I prefer to stream my music than have it using space on my solid state drive and I only have premium to avoid adverts.

I'm guessing you have root control of the server? Install Varnish, it's a reverse proxy that caches request results in the RAM.

They are not unprofitable, they are just quite slim http://www.dailyfinance.com/2013/01/29/amazon-earnings-stron... (It's profit margin on a product is 0.5%).

> This economic downturn is breeding a whole generation of just-try-to-stop-me kids.

I disagree that the economic downturn is the cause of these young peoples motivations. I would argue that due to a large amount of people achieving a high level of education, degrees are not a foot in the door. As a result personal investments such as attending networking events, doing work experience and building an online presence (Such as a quality GitHub account) will make it a lot easier to stand out from the herd.

Yeah there is: http://toolong-didntread.com/feed

3 million downloads bringing in $10K revenues, that dosen't seem like a huge amount of money considering the spike in users of the app.

Hopefully Microsoft will stop dragging it's feet with Windows Phone 8. I dred to think of a mobile market with only two decent OS options.

I'm taking the approach of putting an image in their place of social buttons, than when a user hovers near the element replacing the image with the working javascript one.

That said, I think PageSpeed Service will only benefit really poorly coded sites who's webmasters aren't tech confident enough to optimise a site correctly.

They have this in the UK with the ISP BT. It's opt-in, but while lots of other people use it, I've never used it.