from Hacker News

Lessons learnt from monetising my Chrome Extension

by rogem002 on 11/10/16, 11:08 PM with 42 comments

  • by rogem002 on 11/10/16, 11:09 PM

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

  • by stockkid on 11/11/16, 3:10 AM

    Kudos for making it open source.

    I wonder if the sales will increase if you make source code unavailable. The reason is that, as you said, it is very easy for people to just run unpacked extensions in dev mode.

  • by thomseddon on 11/11/16, 2:37 PM

    Thanks for writing the post, I built a moderately popular extension in 2012 "Twitcher" for switching between twitter accounts (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/twitcher-twitter-a...).

    I've toyed with different monetisation strategies over the last couple of years, I even conducted a 6 month survey of what people would be willing to pay. In the end I decided I couldn't justify charging for it and a few months ago I rolled out a "pay-what-you-want" model like AdBlockPlus, during the A/B test on 20% of users I generated just over $100 dollars in the first 2 weeks, then basically nothing - so the annual/monthly model is attractive!

    I like the idea of keeping it open source, then those who don't want to pay can still use it - think I may follow your model :)

  • by bbrian on 11/11/16, 4:11 AM

    I have a similar 'lessons' write-up of a Chrome extension I made a few years ago. I built it to enable safe-search on all the computers in a few schools I was working in and deployed it with Group Policy:

    https://brianhenryie.wordpress.com/2014/12/12/enable-safesea...

  • by sandeep048 on 11/11/16, 4:33 AM

    Isn't this the same as keeping dev tools open with cache disabled? I get more useful debugging information from console this way.

  • by NicoJuicy on 11/11/16, 1:07 PM

    For some reason, 1 € per month seems cheaper in my mind than 5€ per year.

    Perhaps experiment with that :)

  • by Chris2048 on 11/11/16, 7:50 PM

    There's a bit of a "I'll freely share, if you freely share" about extensions. Isn't it a bad precedent , given how much is freely contributed, to build something monetized on top of that?

  • by qwerrty on 11/11/16, 5:27 AM

    rqwr