
Lessons learnt from monetising my Chrome Extension - rogem002
https://mikerogers.io/2016/10/29/lessons-learnt-from-monetising-my-chrome-extension.html
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rogem002
I wrote the extension and this blog post, so I'm happy to answer any follow up
questions you might have :)

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seanwilson
I'm working on an extension myself so this was a great read!

Did you consider making it a free extension (with enough features to be
usable) with in-app payments to unlock more features? You would think that
would keep your downloads up and give more people a chance to try it out.

Also, why did you go with a subscription and not a one-off payment? Did you
get any user feedback on if this discouraged a purchase?

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rogem002
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.

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seanwilson
> Awesome! What is your extension?

It's still under wraps but I'd be happy to compare experiences when I launch.

> 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.

Hmm, maybe by default when you click the button make it show the config pop-up
you have already with an added upgrade banner. You could add an option to not
show the config pop-up on click as well.

I have no figures to back this up but unless you're a well known brand I think
not having a completely free version to try will turn away a lot of potential
sales. You say in your post you had a noticeable drop in the web store charts
after making it a paid app.

> 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'd avoid equating code complexity with how much you charge. Charge by how
much value your extension brings to customers. If it's saving a freelancer X
number of hours per month then that's worth something more than the number of
lines of code it took to write. Live reload is a big productivity boost.

By the way, did you look into experimenting with price changes? Since I last
looked, you can easily change the in-app purchase price but you can't with
subscriptions. I think the only option for the latter is to create new
subscription IDs for each price.

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stockkid
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.

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rogem002
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 ;)

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KayL
May not much differences I think. Chrome warns you on each startup for non-
store extensions. It's annoying. If they do one more steps, there're some
NODEJS tools for them also. So that I think this extension really needs to
focus on newbies.

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thomseddon
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...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/twitcher-twitter-
account/gmngpagflejjoblmmamaonmnkghjmebh?hl=en-GB)).

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 :)

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corobo
Hey I've actually come across this extension before! I think I ruled it out
instantly due to the name, I believe I thought it was something to do with the
streaming site Twitch rather than anything to do with Twitter.

If it helps any the way I was searching was for keyword (not neccesarily
these) twitter account switch, twitter clients, etc and opened up a list of
things that matched in tabs to then go on and short list. Ruling this out
quickly as it seemed to be something to do with Twitch rather than Twitter.

As an aside I'm sorry to say I wouldn't pay anything for something that's just
saving me 3 clicks every so often. Needs more functionality.

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bbrian
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...](https://brianhenryie.wordpress.com/2014/12/12/enable-safesearch-
extension/)

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sandeep048
Isn't this the same as keeping dev tools open with cache disabled? I get more
useful debugging information from console this way.

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endless1234
I'm assuming this extension livereloads (ie without a page refresh) the
resources when they change on the server. Right?

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rogem002
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.

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

Perhaps experiment with that :)

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rogem002
I will ;)

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Chris2048
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?

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rogem002
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.

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qwerrty
rqwr

