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How is this not just an extension on Chrome by a single developer?

gnicholas 6y ago
Fair point, though as someone who manages two Chrome extensions, I can speak to the danger of building a company on that foundation. For example, they offered payments through the Chrome Webstore for years. Late last year, they announced they were pulling the plug on payments, effective February 1. They gave scant instructions on how to migrate your users, and they declined to provide you with the email addresses of said users, so that you might be able to contact them. They didn't make explicit what would happen if you failed to migrate people in time (would they lose access to your extension, have free access forever, have it uninstalled from their browser?). They also declined to notify the users that Google payments were going away and that they should expect paid extensions to have a new payment system and upcoming migration. They also have new extension review rules all the time, and they occasionally nuke your extension for no good reason. [1] It's nice to be able to reach people on Chrome, but it comes at a substantial cost. 1: https://beelinereader.medium.com/google-yanked-my-chrome-extension-this-sunday-d9c481e285cb https://beelinereader.medium.com/google-yanked-my-chrome-ext...
- Glench 6y ago
  Yeah, Google's handling of extension payments was terrible and sad. On the flip side, I made a replacement https://extensionpay.com https://extensionpay.com that should do a lot better job — I made it for my own extensions and it works cross-browser too :)
kirubakaran 6y ago
It is https://histre.com/ https://histre.com/ :-) Browser extension, solo developer (me), solving the same problem
- gnicholas 6y ago
  Nice! How does your feature set compare to Beam? Looking at pricing, it seems like your primary gating feature is search history, is that right? What does the storage space relate to? Is that just the text from the bookmarks? Or do you store entire pages? Fun fact: I actually know the guy featured in your first customer testimonial. I met Alan years ago at a hackathon, where he helped me build one of the earliest versions of what has become my startup. Great guy!

Fair point, though as someone who manages two Chrome extensions, I can speak to the danger of building a company on that foundation. For example, they offered payments through the Chrome Webstore for years. Late last year, they announced they were pulling the plug on payments, effective February 1. They gave scant instructions on how to migrate your users, and they declined to provide you with the email addresses of said users, so that you might be able to contact them. They didn't make explicit what would happen if you failed to migrate people in time (would they lose access to your extension, have free access forever, have it uninstalled from their browser?). They also declined to notify the users that Google payments were going away and that they should expect paid extensions to have a new payment system and upcoming migration. They also have new extension review rules all the time, and they occasionally nuke your extension for no good reason. [1] It's nice to be able to reach people on Chrome, but it comes at a substantial cost. 1: https://beelinereader.medium.com/google-yanked-my-chrome-extension-this-sunday-d9c481e285cb https://beelinereader.medium.com/google-yanked-my-chrome-ext...

Glench 6y ago
Yeah, Google's handling of extension payments was terrible and sad. On the flip side, I made a replacement https://extensionpay.com https://extensionpay.com that should do a lot better job — I made it for my own extensions and it works cross-browser too :)

kirubakaran 6y ago

It is https://histre.com/ https://histre.com/ :-) Browser extension, solo developer (me), solving the same problem

gnicholas 6y ago
Nice! How does your feature set compare to Beam? Looking at pricing, it seems like your primary gating feature is search history, is that right? What does the storage space relate to? Is that just the text from the bookmarks? Or do you store entire pages? Fun fact: I actually know the guy featured in your first customer testimonial. I met Alan years ago at a hackathon, where he helped me build one of the earliest versions of what has become my startup. Great guy!