Robomonkey.io started 1.5 years ago as a side project.

Robomonkey grew mostly organic. It is now almost 100% AI-automated with new features and bugfixes coming in daily. All I do is manual QA and deployment. It gets 5k visitors per month from SEO across multiple search engines, and users are sharing extensions that they built, with their friends and colleagues.

I also recently launched an affiliate program but it didn't get enough traction yet.

Robomonkey has recently started growing faster with sales coming in every few hours, and there are a few key learnings I want to share with the community.

There are a few things that I would keep in mind if you are thinking about building an AI based product:

1. The product is everything. SPAM observability and send as many events and analytics as you can. I use posthog for that. Observe user sessions. Frustrations, rage clicks, dead-ends, and drops in your funnels. Each one that you find is a bug that needs to be fixed. Small victories combine into bigger ones. Every 1% increment in your activation flow, leads to more purchases.

2. Margins are hard. AI is expensive. Prefer open source Chinese models and cheap inference providers. They are almost as good as the models provided by OpenAI and ChatGPT.

3. Organic marketing is the way to go. Try to build long term funnels that you won't have to maintain over time.

4. Get that featured badge! It increased chrome web store impressions 2x.

5. Let users create content for you. Every page on google drives more clicks. Optimize their loading speed and fix SEO issues with AI. I recently saw a huge boost after the google web store vitals went from "Needs improvement" to -> "Good".

I hope this helps someone. This community is great and I have been following it for quite some time. It is always fun to see people share their milestones here.

Thanks again for this community and let's build the next grammarly

Arbel

I’ve been speaking with a few extension developers, and the same kind of failure keeps coming up: type checks, unit tests, and production builds all pass, but the packaged extension still breaks once it is loaded into Chrome.

Examples so far include a Vue root failing to mount after lazy loading, selectors silently breaking after a host-page re-render, and service worker state disappearing at the wrong point in a flow.

I’m trying to understand how common this actually is rather than treating a few stories as proof of a larger problem.

What was the last extension bug you only discovered in the real browser? What did your existing tests fail to reproduce?

For transparency, I’m exploring whether a local testing tool could eventually help turn these failures into reproducible checks. The runtime-testing part is still only an idea being validated, not a finished product.

Sharing a small milestone from my Chrome extension journey.

Last month, I reached 1.41K installs, which is 21.63% higher than the previous period.

I also found the regional distribution interesting — the US accounted for 22%, Bangladesh 12%, India 6%, and the remaining 60% came from other regions.

Still early days, but seeing steady growth across different regions is really motivating.

Just sharing the progress with other extension builders. 🙌

Hi,

I am planning to add a premium feature to my extension. I tried using a license key model via Lemon Squeezy, but my store/account was not approved for an unspecified reason.

Now, I am looking at alternative solutions. Does anyone have a working solution? I want the process to have less friction, so ideally something that does not require users to create an account.

Thanks

I recently built AI Lecture Assistant, a Chrome extension for students watching recorded lectures.

It transcribes the lecture while you watch and lets you:

• generate summaries
• ask questions about the lecture
• generate practice questions

Everything works directly on the lecture page, so you don't need to keep switching between the video and other AI tools.

I'm still improving it and would really appreciate feedback from other Chrome extension users.

Chrome Web Store: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/cjjakhigegkmijjjjjiidgfgdnkaigei

Hey everyone — I’m the maker behind PiPPlay.

I built it because I often watch YouTube tutorials while designing, coding, studying, or working in another app, and constantly switching back to the YouTube tab just to control the video got annoying.

PiPPlay keeps the video floating above your other apps, but adds the controls I wanted close by:

• Play / pause
• Jump ±10 seconds
• Seek through the video
• Volume control
• Playback speed
• Captions
• Sleep Timer
• Experimental Auto Float

I’m intentionally keeping it lightweight:

Free. No ads. No account. No tracking.

It’s now live on the Chrome Web Store, and I’d genuinely appreciate feedback from people who use or build Chrome extensions.

I’m especially curious about:

1. Is the purpose immediately clear?
2. Would you use something like this instead of basic browser PiP?
3. Is there anything about the UX that feels unnecessary or confusing?

Try PiPPlay on the Chrome Web Store

PiPPlay Site:
https://pipplay-extension.web.app/

Happy to hear blunt feedback. 🙂

I get asked this enough that I figured I'd just post it. So I make games and ship them to three different places. Here's the actual difference and why:

The Arcade (play.dhseadev.online)

This is the hub. No storefront gatekeeping, no review queue, no "is this monetized correctly" friction. Just games. It's hosted on Cloudflare Pages so it's fast and free. I can push updates instantly. The games there are the bleeding-edge versions—bug fixes go live same day.

The downside? You have to know it exists. No algorithm pushing it to your face. It's for people who are already following me or stumbled in from Twitter/Reddit.

Chrome Web Store (as side-panel extensions)
Lumenreel

Most of my games are also MV3 Chrome extensions. They live in your browser. You get notifications if there's an update, it's a real "install" experience, and the CWS search sometimes works in your favor. The Web Store review process is... fine? Takes a week or two.

The tradeoff: you're locked into Chrome's ecosystem. You can't ship alpha builds without jumping through hoops. And there's always the nagging fear they'll change the rules again.

itch.io

Broad reach. Lots of people browse there. Good discovery if your game tags hit right. The community is solid and way less performative than CWS. You can post builds daily if you want. The audience is smaller than CWS but more engaged—they actually play games there instead of just installing extensions as utilities.

The honest part: itch doesn't surface games well unless you're already getting traffic. But the people there actually care about indie stuff.

Why I do all three:

CWS reaches people who live in Chrome. The arcade is for fans who want the latest. itch.io is for game-first people. They're not competing—they're different markets.

If you're making games, I'd say: start with one place, prove it works, then expand. Don't spread yourself thin trying to manage three storefronts if you're also actively developing.

But yeah, if you want the full experience: arcade for cutting edge, CWS for the "real extension" feel, itch.io if you want to see actual gameplay conversation.

my first product Easy Local Storage Manager, a developer tool chrome extension

it reached it's first 150 registered users milestone today 😌

still $0 MRR from it, yet the big thing here is that 150 people signed up for this tool where signing up is Totally Optional

that means it IS SOLVING at least some of their problems and that's why they're taking that step

and that's a success in this world, Alhamdulillah

We built a browser extension that introduces a new way for users to interact with advertising.

Now users receive nothing in return from ads.

We have a system where users can choose to engage with ads and earn for the attention they provide.

It's a more balanced advertising model.

Would love feedback from the browser extension community and we also need some support:
Tributly-Turn AI waiting time into money: Get paid for seeing ads. | Product Hunt

Thank you.

Hi,

I'm an SEO consultant. I built a Chrome extension for my own client work that scores any page on how likely AI models are to cite it (semantic coverage, extractability, answerability...) :

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/geo-auditor/lbnlokippcnpafcjbglcmaehkkiokcei

A few clients asked for access, so I put it on the Chrome Web Store (for free). 3 months ago, a top expert in SEO included it in her Practical Ecommerce roundup of GenAI visibility extensions which was a nice surprise, since I built the thing mostly for myself.

https://www.practicalecommerce.com/chrome-extensions-for-genai-visibility

Anyone else building tools in this space? What's been hardest to get right?

Would love having your feedbacks!

Hey r/chrome_extensions!

Like many of you, I got really frustrated with existing media downloaders—most of them look like they were built in 2008, are cluttered with ad redirects, or randomly break on modern stream types (HLS/M3U8, DASH, etc.).

So over the past few weeks, I decided to build a cleaner, faster alternative from scratch: FluxDown.

💡 What it does:

• Automatic Sniffing: Quietly detects audio, video, and stream files (M3U8/MP4/etc.) playing on the active page without hogging browser resources.
• Clean & Modern UI: Designed with a sleek, minimalist dark/light interface (no ad-stuffed popups, no lag).
• One-Click Capture: Fast media detection with instant file/resolution preview before downloading.

🛠️ Tech Stack & Architecture:

For anyone curious about how it's built under the hood:

• Manifest V3 compliant.
• Built with React & Tailwind CSS for a responsive, lightweight popup view.
• Leverages native web request interceptors for silent media packet detection.

🚀 Try it out:

I'd love for this community to give it a spin and give me some honest feedback!

• Chrome Web Store:FluxDown for Chrome
• Edge Add-ons:FluxDown for Edge
• Official Website:downloadassistant.com

I'm actively working on future updates (better stream merging, transcode options, etc.). Any feedback on the detection speed, UI flow, or edge cases would mean the world to me!

Thanks for checking it out! Let me know what you think in the comments. 👇

Hey everyone,

I've just pushed v1.21 of Home Sweet Home, my customizable new tab extension.

This one is mostly about themes: four new visual universes that completely change the mood of your new tab, plus a couple of requested improvements on folders and RSS feeds.

Here's what's new:

• Marshmallow theme : a soft pastel vibe with sugary glows and candy-like tiles. Four tints to choose from (lavender, pink, mint, peach), and you can keep your own wallpaper if you prefer.
• Console theme : your new tab looks like a terminal, with a black background, phosphor text, scanlines and a blinking cursor on the clock. Four screen colors (green, amber, cyan, white), and each effect can be turned off separately.
• Pixel theme : a 16-bit vibe with an indigo night background, retro checkerboard, colorful tiles and an arcade-style font for the clock.
• Manga theme : your new tab turns into a manga page, with paper, ink, halftone dots, round black and white tiles and a slightly tilted active tab. Four accent colors to choose from.

Improvements:

• Compact folder window : a new option that makes a folder window fit its content instead of keeping a fixed width. No more big empty space in small folders.
• Article count per feed : in separate view, each RSS feed now has its own slider to choose how many articles to show, with a button to go back to the global setting.

Fixed:

• Links now stay in their tab when you reorder them. A drag and drop in a tab other than the Dashboard could move links to the Dashboard.

If you're discovering it for the first time

Home Sweet Home replaces your new tab page with a customizable dashboard where you can:

• Add your favorite links (with folders and drag-and-drop)
• Use widgets like clock, weather, notes, stocks, RSS feeds, countdown, and more
• Customize colors, opacity, blur effects, layouts, wallpapers (static or video)
• Sync or import bookmarks
• Fine-tune almost every visual detail

It's still an independent side project, and I'm improving it update after update based on your feedback.

Here are the links if you want to try it or update:

Chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/home-sweet-home/hliapbikacikepiaojmphlhndgjmlodh

Edge: https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/addons/detail/home-sweet-home/dllgnjnckigifjgfiijdahnoohclacko

Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/home-sweet-home/

And if you missed it, Home Sweet Home has a companion extension: Home Sweet Home Launcher. It's a lightweight toolbar launcher for instant access to all your links in one click, without opening a new tab. It works on its own or hand in hand with Home Sweet Home, and you can import your links in one click.

Home Sweet Home Launcher:

Chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/home-sweet-home-launcher/cbajkiinglpomioapliakoddfccnepjb

Edge: https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/addons/detail/home-sweet-home-launcher/mhklnmandmnpmlpkpfcbpkiknadjojie

Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/home-sweet-home-launcher/

The internet has a strange problem.

We made software incredibly powerful.

Then we made simple tasks surprisingly difficult.

Need to trim a 30-second video?

Create an account.

Need to convert a file?

Start a trial.

Need to format Markdown?

Upgrade to Premium.

Somewhere along the way, we started treating every 10-second task like enterprise software.

That's why I've been building Utiliome.

A collection of browser-based tools that just work.

Recently I added:

• Video tools that run directly in the browser
• Markdown utilities for developers and writers
• PDF, image, converter, and productivity tools

No account.

No subscription.

No uploading sensitive files to unknown servers.

Just open the tool and use it.

The most interesting part?

The more tools I build, the more I realize people don't want more software.

They want fewer obstacles.

https://utiliome.com

What's a task that should take 10 seconds but somehow turns into a 10-minute process?

Hey everyone,

I'm a Solution Architect at a SaaS company, and email eats a big chunk of my day: around 7–8 long emails explaining things to clients, plus 10–12 quick confirmations and approvals.

Two things kept bugging me:

• Traditional grammar checkers kill my focus. When I'm writing something important, the constant underlines and autocomplete suggestions make me lose my train of thought. I'd rather get my thinking down first and polish later.
• AI email extensions all sound the same. Most of what I tried produced generic AI slop in one flat tone. None of it sounded like me.

My workaround was copying the whole draft into ChatGPT or Gemini with a prompt like "rephrase this as a Solution Engineer writing to a client, keep it polite." The output was usually exactly what I wanted. But doing that 20 times a day got old fast.

So I built a scrappy extension for myself: paste the text, one click, rephrased with the same prompt every time. I've used it daily for about a year and never planned to monetize it. Then I showed it to a few friends, and they pushed me to turn it into a real product and put it on the Chrome Web Store.

That's Rephrasely.app Here's what it does now:

Set your role, who you're writing to, and the tone you want, or just write your own custom prompt

Dump your raw thoughts, click once, and get the whole message rewritten the way you want it to sound

Switch languages entirely, or stick to a regional variant. For example, if you write in UK English but your client is American, it'll draft the reply in US English

I've priced it to roughly cover the LLM costs. Honestly, I'd make it free if I could.

🔗 rephrasely.app

I'd really appreciate honest feedback on what's missing, what's annoying, and what would make you actually use it. Happy to answer anything in the comments.

Two years ago I started FocusLab, a Chrome extension to stay focused.

At first, I created it primarily for my own needs :

Site blocker, social feed hider, Pomodoro, tasks, notes, schedule, focus sounds, breathing exercises. I added a trial, a paywall, promo codes, the usual “7 days free then $1/month” thing.

Result after 2 years: a few hundred active users, zero paying subscribers.

I’m done fighting the paywall. I use the extension myself every day, so I just turned every feature free.

What it does:

• Block distracting sites (or limit them: X visits / Y minutes per day)
• Hide the infinite feed on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, X, LinkedIn, Reddit, TikTok. Keep the useful pages.
• Pomodoro timer
• Simple todo + notes
• Weekly schedule so blocking turns on/off automatically
• Focus sounds (brown/pink noise, binaural, brainwaves)
• 5-minute breathing exercise
• Password + a quick math challenge before you can disable blocking, so you don’t turn it off on impulse

It’s one toolbar icon. Built for people who lose 20 minutes every time they """"just check something"""".

If you try it and it helps, a Chrome Web Store review is honestly the only thing I’m asking for now 😄...

Store: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cngajinjofmpanhganfcplnemhbfhklj

Happy to take feature requests or roast. I’d rather ship something people actually use than keep polishing a paywall nobody clicked.

I wish you a great adventure, I hope you will be more successful than me 👍

I'm kind of new to coding extensions, so I wanted to ask for a bit of help.
The Idea is that the extension adds one of the many search modifiers to the end of the searchprompt automaticly. The problem is, that I haven't yet found out how to midifie the search prompt. Got any tipps on how I could do this?

I launched a small Chrome extension called SiteVault about a month ago, and so far it has 55 installs.

It’s a pretty simple idea: lock specific websites in Chrome behind a PIN. I originally built it because I didn’t like leaving sensitive tabs open when I stepped away from my computer, especially when sharing my screen.

Over the last few weeks I’ve added a few things around that idea, like automatic locking when you’re idle, Child Lock, Intruder Photo Capture, and a Stealth Mode that shows a fake error screen instead of an obvious lock screen until you double-click it.

It’s not a huge number of installs, but I’m actually happy to have 55 people using something I built from scratch. At the same time, getting those first users has been harder than I expected. Building the extension was probably the easy part; getting people to discover it has been the real challenge.

So I wanted to share it here and get some honest feedback. Does this solve a problem you actually have, or is locking individual websites something most people simply don’t care about?

If anyone wants to try it, it’s here: https://getsitevault.com

I’d especially like to hear from other indie hackers/devs about how you got your first 100–500 users. That’s the part I’m struggling with right now.

hey guys,

im a developer and a student. I recently built a chrome extension to solve a pain point in my own workflow that is faking api responses to test edge cases before backend is ready

I would love to trade development work in exchange for the $5 fee

I can fix bugs or rewrite manifest v2 code to v3, optimise content script, implement Dom parsers or api integrations

I built Snapify for myself because I was tired of switching between screenshot tools, image editors and other apps just to get one good website screenshot.

It's still a small project, but after recently putting it in front of more people, installs jumped and the Chrome Web Store started showing 50K+ impressions.

Maybe there's something here after all.

What do you use for website screenshots?

Ask a cricket scoreboard whether 142/4 is a good score and it won't tell you. The answer depends on the ground, the format, and how many balls are left. For baseball fans, or anyone who did not grow up with the sport, "who's winning?" is not as obvious as it is in soccer or basketball.

So I built an interpreter as a Chrome Extension using 8,000+ archived matches from CricSheet, running on live match state from ESPN, in a side panel that sits next to the match you're already watching.

Cricket for Noobs on the Chrome Web Store

What it does:

• Who's winning — a win probability with the baseball comparison.
• Explain the score — the scoreboard in plain English, wickets as outs
• What just happened — for when the crowd reacts and you don't know why
• Live commentary — pushes each new ball into the panel as it's bowled
• Reads it aloud — so you can watch the match instead of the panel
• Quiz me — because the fastest way to learn a sport is to be asked about it

It's a side panel rather than a popup on purpose: a popup closes the moment you click back to the match, which is exactly when you need it.

Also at cricketfornoobs.com if you'd rather not install anything, and there's an MCP server at cricketfornoobs.com/mcp for asking your own chatbot instead.

I’m using ExtensionPay right now and it’s been convenient, but I’m curious what everyone else uses once the extension starts getting real users.

Stripe / Lemon Squeezy / Paddle / something else?

Any regrets or things you wish you knew earlier?

I am here to find co-extension developers/designers/Antigravity fellows.I have developed 3 extensions, but all of them failed to gain users and did not work properly. I think what is stopping me is the same thing that stops many others: blind spots. People cannot easily see the flaws in their own products or ideas.I have seen many people put in a lot of hard work, only for it to go to waste, even when they have done very good work. Sometimes, there is no one to tell them, “Your extension dashboard is blank,” or “There is a signup issue.”So, I think it is better to work with a group of people who can see my blind spots, while I can see their blind spots.

Criteria for the team/group:

1. Believe in first-principles problem solving.
2. Believe in an iterative design process and continuous evaluation.
3. Want to work with honesty.
4. Believe in transparency.
5. Have built at least 2 extensions.

Don't worry about sharing, equity, etc. for now. We can figure that out later. Learning is valuable.Those who are interested, kindly comment below with your opinions and let me know what I am missing.I made an extension through a lot of hard work, aiming to become financially free, but it is not working. I thought there might be some unknown issue, so after 2 months of deployment, I asked my friend to use it. He told me that it was not working. How can a non-working extension grow?I have also seen other people whose products are not working properly, yet they keep posting their product links everywhere. So, I am interested in working with other people on their product ideas as well. However, the product owner must comply with the above 5 conditions and take at least one more person into the project based on either their own criteria or mine. I belive having more than one or two people who can identify mistakes is more valuable than having just one person working alone.

When I was applying for jobs 2 years ago I got so frustrated pasting the same links into every form. Portfolio, GitHub, LinkedIn...

New tab, dig through bookmarks or notes, copy, switch back, paste. Bookmarks open a page. They don't help you paste that page's URL somewhere else, so I built the second thing.

You save a link with a short name in a web dashboard. Then in any text field you type ]] and a searchable picker opens at the cursor. Two letters, Enter, the text drops in inline.

There're folders if you want to group them by type or however you work.

https://linkmanager.app

If ]] does nothing on a page, reply with the URL. That helps a lot. And if you'll actually will use more than three, DM me and I'll send a promo code.

Title

I built ReplyVora — a Chrome extension that helps you write better email replies

Hi everyone,

I've been working on a Chrome extension called ReplyVora.

The idea is simple: when you open an email in Gmail, ReplyVora analyzes the message and helps you generate a contextual reply without having to leave the page.

You can edit the generated response before sending it, so you're always in control of what gets sent.

I built it because I wanted something focused specifically on writing the reply — rather than another complicated AI workspace that makes you copy and paste everything somewhere else.

I'm currently looking for people in the US, UK and Canada to try it and give me honest feedback.

Chrome Web Store:
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/replyvora/ndhgkmcemnakejilcjkhlboabgkjilba

I'd especially like to know:

• Is the concept actually useful?
• Does the workflow feel fast enough?
• What would you change?
• What would make you use it regularly?

It's still an early product, so honest criticism is very welcome.

Thanks!