"There is no way to bulk export your existing user licenses, so you need to have your users help with this part of the migration."
Imagine this with your GCP infrastructure...
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Chrome Web Store payments deprecation
81–90 of 175 posts
Re: Chrome Web Store payments deprecation
#82The interesting thing here is that a commercial marketplace for browser extensions failed. That seems surprising - surely a marketplace for extensions to the most popular browser on the planet could bring in some revenue?! Is it just that nobody paid for things? Presumably they're going to keep running the chrome web store, so isn't a cut of paymens "free money" to them? Is there some big cost to this I'm not seeing,…
Maybe because mobile Chrome refuses to support extensions for fear of adblock killing the golden goose?
Re: Chrome Web Store payments deprecation
#83This is super annoying. I have two extensions, one which we've offered on Chrome and Firefox for years, and which uses Stripe for payments. The other we only offered on Chrome and was paid through the Chrome Store. Thinking of all the work we'll have to do to manage accounts/payments/etc on the PDF extension almost makes me want to scrap the whole thing. Most frustrating is the migration. We have been live in the Chr…
Depending on what 5x is, you might not annoy as many users as you think.
I did a major pricing overhaul with my SaaS company a few years ago and made lots of sincere appeals to users. They generally supported me and the app. I had some churn, but I knee it was coming. It worked out for the best.
Of course, my experience is going to be unique but with the right transparency and explanation you may be overcome a lot of reflexive pushback.
Re: Chrome Web Store payments deprecation
#84Confirming over and over: https://medium.com/@steve.yegge/dear-google-cloud-your-depre...
https://killedbygoogle.com/ This is my favorite site tracking stuff like this.
I started seeing it again after a long time, felt sad at the products I missed, felt at the products they discontinued after a really long time, and then I realized that some of these products were superseded by other products that were nearly similar OR they were merged into bigger products.
I wish the site would say as much.
Re: Chrome Web Store payments deprecation
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
What "healthy economy of paid software" previously existed here? The only other site for browser extensions I'm aware of which predated the Chrome Web Store was addons.mozilla.org, and that never supported paid extensions at all.
Whatever you would use a browser extension to do now, there was probably a standalone application to do the same thing before. The original vision of the web didn't just have "sites with servers" and "consumers with browsers", but rather tons of potential independent "User-Agents" that would perform tasks on behalf of people. The consolidation of the web into just browsers, and subsequent flipflopping between creatio…
> Whatever you would use a browser extension to do now, there was probably a standalone application to do the same thing before.
I don't buy that argument. While I can't speak for all users, most of the extensions I use are ones which modify the behavior of the web browser or of specific web pages. They wouldn't have any meaning outside the context of a web browser.
Maybe paid extensions represented part of a different ecosystem? If so, though, it's one I never really encountered a need for.
Re: Chrome Web Store payments deprecation
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is destroying competition though. What Google does is enter a market which previously had a healthy economy of paid software, snuff out all the other players with a free version, and then abandon the space when they get bored. And the old economy can never come back, because there's hysteresis involved in the relative costs of starting from scratch versus keeping a functioning ecosystem alive, and because users…
There was never a healthy economy of paid browser extensions, neither before nor after Google's entry into the space.
Maybe not paid browser extensions, but firefox had an amazing library of extensions and Chrome stole their thunder. Of course then Ff shot themselves in the foot by deprecating XUL and requiring developers rewrite their scripts, but with everyone on Chrome, very few people did.
Re: Chrome Web Store payments deprecation
#87How weird, I was just thinking about this today. I've had an optional "Buy for $0.99" button next to the three Chrome extensions I made back in 2016. It's brought in around $1.50 per month from the US, Australia, Japan, Russia, Ireland, South Africa, a ton of different countries. I'm not sure why people have been buying it but it always made me feel good to see that some little thing I made was liked by someone incredibly far away.
Re: Chrome Web Store payments deprecation
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you able to query what they were paying? e.g. google.payments.inapp.getPurchases
Yeah, it looks like there is a way to do this. But this requires them to authenticate to allow it, and is a hassle on both ends. Seriously, what a huge pain for all involved. It is shocking they are giving such a short timeline for this transition, especially during COVID (they use COVID as an excuse for slow processing times, but clearly they don't care that devs would be similarly affected).
Maybe provide some options:
- Default to an automatic resubscription for (say) 50-75% of the current list price
- Consent to OAuth2Google ("one-time blahblahblah"), and retrieve perpetual payment info that way
- Accept Store receipts (capturing all email headers and keeping all PDFs for cross-comparison... meh)
I wonder if you should send 2 warning emails or 3. ("action required" "your account will automatically be subscribed unless...")
This is maybe a gray-ish pattern, but would convert some percentage of users to a higher ongoing subscription level. This sounds like a line-of-business type extension, so that percentage may be marginally appreciable.
Perhaps combat the boringness aspect of the store-receipt process by sending solicitation emails ASAP to get that rolling.
And, hrm, anticipate refunds. :(
Re: Chrome Web Store payments deprecation
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is destroying competition though. What Google does is enter a market which previously had a healthy economy of paid software, snuff out all the other players with a free version, and then abandon the space when they get bored. And the old economy can never come back, because there's hysteresis involved in the relative costs of starting from scratch versus keeping a functioning ecosystem alive, and because users…
What "healthy economy of paid software" previously existed here? The only other site for browser extensions I'm aware of which predated the Chrome Web Store was addons.mozilla.org, and that never supported paid extensions at all.
I think for a while, Google sort of hoped to turn Chrome extensions into something like actual apps. They seemed to support stuff like making desktop icons for them, opening them in windows that seemed to be independent from Chrome, making them the only way to make something that seemed like a real app on Chromebooks, etc. With all of that in place, it seems to make sense to let people pay charge/pay for them. Then I guess they just kind of got tired of it, as Google tends to do, and started dropping various parts of that system.
Probably the only reason they bothered to post a notice and write a really lame migration plan is that a decent number of developers were making money from it and would pitch a fit if it just disappeared.
Re: Chrome Web Store payments deprecation
#90This sucks. I paid $25 for my play console account to monetize my extension two days ago - just to find out they deprecate web store payments entirely.
I have no connection to any of the teams involved, but if you have problems getting this resolved, please send me a mail (my HN name @google.com) and I'll make it right.
HEY EVERYONE, GOOGLE REALLY DOES HAVE SUPPORT. ITS RIGHT HERE!!!!!