I was thinking about this too. I just want to recoup some of my time investment. My only concern is that it'll make some people not buy in hopes that they can wait for others to pay - but I suppose those people would probably just use Chrome/Firefox with free plugins anyway.

Thanks, I'll think more about this. I think it'd also give people confidence in the security of the code - running browser extensions is a little scary since they technically have access to everything. As a customer, knowing that it'd be open sourced would give me some peace of mind that it's not doing anything malicious.

A different consideration is people's motivation to pay, and longevity is one aspect of that - buyer's confidence.

I paid money for an extension that promptly became unsupported and then died in an upgrade. Which is fine, whatever, but it did put a big question mark over the category of "paid browser extension" for me.

Knowing the source will be out there would fix that part for me - I may not be able to take over dev, but I could at least try to fix things that break until I find a replacement.

Thanks for explaining that. I forget the exact history, but I know they've changed up the extension types/APIs multiple times in the past few years. I think a lot of developers/companies gave up on them after being forced to rewrite.

To confirm, is the model you and the parent would like:

"After x units are sold, or after 12 months (whichever comes first), the project will be open sourced and changed to free in the App Store. It will then be supported with an optional in-app-purchase donation - with no nagging or feature differences."

I'm personally not super picky about the particular terms, those would work for me.

Yeah, writing extensions for browsers appears to be increasingly unpleasant.