Can You Make Money From Chrome Extensions in 2026?

What the numbers say about reach

We crawl the store ourselves. As of 3 October 2026 we hold data on 61,820 live extensions, which is about 21% of the IDs in the store's sitemap.

So read every count below as "in our crawl so far", not "in the whole store".

The median is 857 users. That's the middle extension, the one sitting exactly halfway down the list.

If even 2% of 857 people paid you $5 a month, that's about $85. Real money, but a hobby amount. Our guide to making money with Chrome extensions shows how to check a niche before you build.

Can you make money from Chrome extensions? Where it changes hands

Google announced in September 2020 that Chrome Web Store payments were being deprecated (TechRadar report), so builders bring their own. In our crawl, 572 extensions carry a payment sign we can see from the listing or the manifest.

The common ones:

• ExtensionPay: 142 extensions. Its homepage lists a 5% fee per charge with no monthly fee (extensionpay.com, checked 3 Oct 2026).
• Gumroad: 119.
• Lemon Squeezy: 92.
• Stripe directly: 36.
• Polar: 35.

Now the honest catch. 572 is far too low. Listings hide most pricing. Grammarly (40,000,000 users), Momentum (2,000,000) and Mailtrack (3,000,000) all charge, and none of them puts a payment host in its manifest or a price in its summary.

So "no price on the listing" tells you almost nothing. You have to read the publisher's website. See the top paid Chrome extensions for ten big examples.

For the current numbers, check the writing assistants page.

The shapes that tend to work

Say you're three months into a tab manager with 4,000 users. Here's the honest menu.

1. Freemium with a hard limitFree for 3 saved sessions, paid for unlimited. Momentum does a version of this: Momentum Plus is $39.95 a year (momentumdash.com/plus, checked 3 Oct 2026).
2. Extension as the front door to a web appMailtrack, Streak and GMass all work this way. The extension is free. The account is what you pay for.
3. CreditsKeywords Everywhere sells usage credits rather than a subscription.
4. Team seatsOnce a tool lives in a work inbox, a manager pays for ten seats at once.

Donations sit at the bottom. They're fine for goodwill and rarely cover a coffee habit.

What makes it hard

Three things stop most extensions earning:

• Too few users. Under 1,000 users, even a great conversion rate makes pocket money.
• A free twin. If an open-source copy does 90% of the job, your price has to buy the last 10%. The five business model shapes show what can still be charged for.
• Store risk. One policy strike can pull a listing overnight, and your income goes with it.

We're biased here, since Ext Watch exists to answer this kind of question with data. On the Openings page you can filter for large, poorly rated extensions in a niche before you write a line of code.

Open the top five listings in your niche tonight and look for a pricing page. That's the card by the door.