Is subscription-based monetization allowed in Chrome extensions?

[Jeff Lindgrun]

Hi all

I've been working on my extension for some time and now thinking about adding internal purchases. Was looking at extensionpay.com or appbox.space as payment solution.

I asked chatgpt about best practices for monetization and it gave me this recent thread where people say CWS started removing extensions with subscription monetization: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/chromium-extensions/c/m9V8BJOgTEg

honestly its quite scary to read, because i was about to integrate subscription..

Could somebody from chrome web store team please clarify: are subscriptions allowed in chrome extensions? Is it ok to use third party paywall sdk?

Would really appreciate official answer before I spend weeks on integration that might get my extension removed.

Thanks!

[Don Schmitt]

Has this issue with extensionpay been resolved? How can Google remain quiet about this? As far as I can tell these platforms that are getting banned are simply allowing developers to charge money for their extensions. Am I missing something? Was there some change in policy? Is the message here that the extension platform is essentially just for developers who want to work for free or who are willing to sell their extensions to nefarious actors who can manage to secretly monetize the web traffic?

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[Oliver Dunk]

Hi both,

I just posted an update in the other thread which you might find interesting.

To reiterate, you are allowed to use third-party services to monetize a Chrome Extension. However, you do need to make sure the use of monetization and any paywall behavior is disclosed in your Chrome Web Store listing.

Additionally, when using a library provided by a third-party in your code, you are responsible for that code. Policies on user data collection (which we updated recently) still apply and we have seen instances where third-party libraries unexpectedly collect user data.

In many of the cases you might see on the mailing list, we removed items from the store for a combination of policy violations. Unfortunately we can't always explain in detail so that nuance can get lost.

Oliver Dunk | DevRel, Chrome Extensions | https://developer.chrome.com/ | London, GB

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/chromium-extensions/CAM7AMp%2B3n3mO17pNgYidsWh%2BZn8PUpFuzBaeE2FYLJZX-g1k3A%40mail.gmail.com.

[Glen Chiacchieri]

Hi friends, I'm the developer behind https://extensionpay.com. Just wanted to clear the air and say that I've never had any reports of extension developers using ExtPay in their extensions getting their extensions taken down. ExtensionPay collects minimal information, purely for functionality, and is completely transparent to the user. Developers just need to disclose that their extensions do have paid upgrades where users will be asked for payment information which is stored securely in our payment processors. 

[Alex Sinclair]

Hi Oliver and Glen,

I just posted a reply in the main thread, sharing it here as well.

Oliver, еhank you so much for the response, we really appreciate it.

While we were waiting for a reply, we came up with a possible theory: the removals happened right around the time this article (https://layerxsecurity.com/blog/aiframe-fake-ai-assistant-extensions-targeting-260000-chrome-users-via-injected-iframes/) was published. The idea is that one appbox.space user created several similar extensions. It looks possible that CWS removed those, and then, by matching the shared library at our domains appbox.space and onlineapp.pro, also removed the other extensions from the list in our first message here, even though they did not break any rule.

So appbox.space itself might have been penalized because one developer misused the library. And if a shared library alone is enough to remove other developers' extensions, this logic could kill any third-party monetization service on CWS.

It's like if several developers used stripe.com, one of them broke the rules, and then all of them got removed just because they use stripe.com.

Glen, thanks for chiming in about extensionpay.com — glad to hear you haven't had these issues. We didn't have any problems at appbox.space either, until one developer happened to misuse the library. A monetization library should not be punished for that.

Oliver, could you please give the legitimate developers from our list a chance to restore their extensions? They are trying to upload new versions, even completely without the paywall, but moderation keeps rejecting them with no explanation.

As for our library, we made sure our service already complies with all the points you mentioned. Our developers, who have never broken any rule, just need a working path forward to update their products.

Right now they cannot do it even without a paywall.

The appeal process you mentioned doesn't help either. Moderation keeps sending the same replies with no additional comments, even though none of these developers broke any rule.

Thank you again for everything you do for the Chrome Web Store ecosystem.

We really hope our service will not be pushed out of the ecosystem (like any other service, including extensionpay.com) in the future just because it was misunderstood by moderation.

Best regards,
Alex

[Oliver Dunk]

Hi Alex,

I've replied in the other thread to keep everything together.

Thanks,

Oliver Dunk | DevRel, Chrome Extensions | https://developer.chrome.com/ | London, GB