A developer, Steve Jones , posted that he started developing a Chrome extension two years ago and invested a lot of money in the process, but was never able to make a profit. So far, I have only earned 200 US dollars, and all of this money was from tips received in the past week.
Specifically, the developer launched a Chrome extension called Zecento two years ago to help users make better purchasing decisions and save money on Amazon. Mainly by analyzing the historical data of the product/seller, it tells the user whether it is a good time to buy, and then sends notifications to the buyer when the price drops (or other merchants offer the same product at a better price). Currently, the extension is only available in Italy, and the author plans to launch it in the United States and Canada later.
Zecento is available to the public in a free form; but in order to make money, the author also launched a paid plan with more complete functions. But here's the problem, only a very small number of users choose the paid plan, causing developers to seriously struggle to make ends meet.
Faced with this situation, Steve also communicated with some other developers who developed Chrome extensions, and found that the difference was similar: everyone had a product that was being used, but there was no way to make money.
In order to improve his situation, Steve developed a new library about a week ago, which provides a channel to reward Chrome browser extension developers through API. In the following week, Steve successively received more than 200 US dollars in funding. "I thought it would be cool if it could be open sourced for other Chrome browser extensions."
Steve also posed a question at the end of the article: What's the biggest problem you've encountered in monetizing your Chrome extension (or any other valuable website without a stable business model)? What problems do you think this product might have?
There was also a heated discussion on this post on Reddit . Some netizens pointed out that Zecento is a Chrome extension, but the main image accompanying the author's post shows Firefox, which is "annoying." "That explains why they lost $15,000."
Others raised questions: How was the $15,000 spent? Are there already similar products on the market? And why doesn’t the author make money by promoting user purchases through affiliate links?
In response, the author replied that he had made many stupid decisions: including spending about US$6,000 to register a company in Italy, and also spending US$2,000 in accounting fees. And spent 2,000 US dollars to find some influential people to promote it, as well as customize branded T-shirts and other promotional expenses.