Building a chrome extension
Thought I would share a blog post I just wrote - might be helpful for other indiehackers as I know many of you are building chrome extensions or on top of other marketplaces: https://www.usetrove.io/blog/building-a-chrome-extension-in-2021/
I could answer questions if you have any as well.
Hey, thanks for sharing the link to the starter kit.
Just brought a licence so I can get up to speed quicker :0)
That's great haha, I'm not affiliated with the starter kit - but it looks like a great resource for the price.
Thanks for sharing, I'm starting on a Chrome extension too and this is super useful!
I've had similar experiences with the review process. Takes a lot of time and they seem to have gotten more strict. Nice article.
Hey Anton, thanks for sharing this tutorial! I'm building a browser extension as a project as well. I was wondering, how you are managing the license keys in your backend ? Is there a third party API services you are using for this ?
It's a one time activation with the license. Once the user activates their license I store it in the browser using the chrome storage API.
License keys are generated and validated on the backend. No third party, it's easy enough to generate the license using a library, it has to be unique and not easily guessable.
I only generate the license after stripe checkout succeeds and redirects user to the success page. On the success page the license is displayed to the user.
Hope that helps!
To improve UX you could also use the extension to parse the shown license from the success page and store it directly, so the user doesn't have to copy/paste it manually
That's a great idea, a nice touch to automatically activate it.
Thanks for the response, very helpful. Is there a particular license library that you would recommend? I noticed Gumroad added support for license key so I was exploring that option as well
Not Anton but here's what I'm planning on doing, I authenticate user requests based on cookies and plan on setting a user attribute flag to true if the user is a premium user. So on the backend, I authenticate the requests and just return a proper response.
You could also use https://extensionpay.com which doesn't make users copy and paste licenses :)