Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

Re:Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shut... by mcrittenden on Saturday May 23, 2020 @04:35PM (#23286174)

I maintain a paid Chrome extension (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/shortkeys-custom-k...) and I've had a very similar experience with the frustrating repeat automated shutdown emails, except that so far my extension hasn't been actually shut down. I'm just waiting for the day that it happens at this point. I'm surprised it has not happened before now, since my extension requires a lot of permissions to do its job.

In my case, I make a nice little side income from that extension so it would be a noticeable income hit. But I'm not sure of anything I can really do to prevent it from being shut down if and when Google's robots decide the time has come.

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Re:Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shut... by droitbutch on Saturday May 23, 2020 @06:49PM (#23287294)

An interesting extension but I am a bit surprised - it seems the target users are developers, which generally have the wherewithal to download the repo and install themselves - how does this result in a "noticeable income"?

Sorry, not trying to be obtuse, just curious from a side-income perspective.

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Re:Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shut... by mcrittenden on Saturday May 23, 2020 @07:38PM (#23287640)

It surprised me too. I started charging a few months ago after it was free for ~7 years. Now I'm making $600 a month off of it.

Paying users seem to be part productivity nerds who maybe aren't technical enough to grok installing from the repo, and part people who just choose to pay for the automatic upgrades or to support the developer. Also, lots of users are web gamers who use it for in-game automation.

I wrote a post about it 1 week after monetizing, if you're curious: https://critter.blog/2020/01/14/week-1-of-monetizing-my-chro...

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