Profitable Chrome Extension Ideas

Hey! A while back I started noticing a weird message on some of my favourite Chrome extensions: "This extension may soon no longer be supported because it doesn't follow best practices for Chrome extensions." Turns out, the Chrome team deprecated Manifest V2 and a LOT of apps still use it. If they don't update, they will be disabled in the next few months. I think this is a HUGE opportunity. So I did what any dev would do in 2024. I asked Cursor to write me a Laravel app that would scrape the entire Chrome web store to find them. I found 84,504 extensions that are outdated spanning a total of 426 million users across them. I put them all in a Google Sheet so you can filter to find high-potential extensions that have a proven user base and will be a gap in the market when they get disabled. With this list you can find an abandoned extension with lots of users and: - Try to acquire them and rebuild on Manifest V3 - Create a new extension to compete and fill the gap in the market - Build these ideas into an existing extension you have (with import options if needed) And I'm giving it away for free. Enjoy!

Love that! 👏 Launched my first extension last week actually, starting from an idea of other gems too. What do you think is the easier to start getting monetized on chrome extensions?

Love this Ian! Can't wait to dig in and see what's in there. Side question - what's your personal favourite Chrome extension?

This is a game-changer, @iannuttall ! 🚀 Have you thought about any specific metrics for determining which extensions have the most potential? Would love to dive deeper into this gap analysis!

Great stuff @iannuttall ! Thanks for putting this together. Are you planning to launch any extensions yourself?

Smashing it as always Ian. Great resource.

Fantastic resource. Lots of chrome extensions need to update to V3, so if anyone wants to see opportunities for creating good extensions that might not be maintained, this is such a great resource. Ian's done it AGAIN!