I recently got into chrome extension development and I noticed three ways to generate revenue:
- Free extension with Donation Button
- Extension with Chrome Web Store Payment (link)
- Custom payment (example: payment on your website)
In terms of technical implementation for accepting payments, the 2nd option is the easiest because Google makes it easy to do. Disadvantages? 5% on transactions + I assume this will not work on Firefox extensions (can someone tell me if I'm right?)
I prefer to go for the third way where I accept payments on my website through Stripe (1.4% + $0.30 in Europe) and keep a firebase database of users that paid. Seems reasonable until I started overthinking it in terms of how I would implement that.
My Implementation
I just assume that to go with the third option I will have to implement some conditional rendering in the chrome extension. Basically just send an XMLHTTPRequest to my firebase database with the user's credentials (e.g: gmail account) and if the credentials match, show them the advanced features, if not show them the basic features.
For reference purposes, this is the XMLHTTPRequest I talk about:
let xhr = new XMLHttpRequest();
// 2. Configure it: GET-request for the URL
xhr.open('GET', 'firebase-database-website/usergmail');
// 3. Send the request over the network
xhr.send();
// the response will be true for paid or false for not paid
// next: save the response in chrome.storage(????) to avoid making thousands of requests every time & speed up
However I believe that there is nothing to stop users from abusing this service, correct? For example, they could always use some javascript to make the extension work without paying for it.
Not that I'm really concerned about it, I just want to know if I am correctly implementing this or if there is something else I could do. Let's consider this an opportunity for growth. Advice and examples of implementations are more than welcome.