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Chrome Web Store payments deprecation
- Gehinnn 6y agoThis sucks. I paid $25 for my play console account to monetize my extension two days ago - just to find out they deprecate web store payments entirely.
- tyingq 6y agoI think they should do prorated refunds.
- sippingjippers 6y agoMake up a support e-mail address at random, send refund request to it, wait 14 days, file chargeback, be sure to mention no response to refund request which is attached to the form. Don't worry, they probably don't pay attention to chargebacks either Alternatively, simply wait 12-18 months and the same feature will be relaunched under a slightly different name by a different team
- filoleg 6y agoAccording to everything i read about chargebacks on Google services, they indeed don’t pay attention, they just automatically block access to any of your Google accounts and services shortly after you do a chargeback. And given the horror stories I’ve heard about trying to resolve or reverse any automated account bans by Google, I do not recommend following that route.
- marcinzm 6y agoYup, companies dislike charge backs and many will block you from all their services for requesting one. So don't go that route unless you never wish to use services from that company again. My wife accidentally did one for a mmorpg she plays and after 6 weeks (and dealing with support, multiple banks, etc.) it was only social media shaming that got them to unban her.
- Andrew_nenakhov 6y agoA company can pay more than $100 for a $1 chargeback, regardless of the outcome, and if your amount of chargebacks exceeds certain threshold, a payment processor may just dump you entirely, so it is very understandable, why 'companies hate chargebacks'. Stripe is a processor with more generous chargeback terms than many out there, but merchants with small payments still suffer from them very much.
- jfrunyon 6y agoWhen I did support for a newly-launched MMO back in 2014, the policy for a chargeback was to permanently disable any using the card, and ban any cards used on those accounts.
- skinnymuch 6y agoThere’s been a couple of casual stuff Here and there on how no one will chargeback Amazon (or Walmart depending on demographic). Not worth the risk compared to dependency. I agree myself and ate a $125 loss from Amazon recently when it didn’t feel worth the trouble. But I’m almost any other circumstance, I would’ve charged back. I used an AMEX for the purchase too. Similarly, until I weaned myself off using Amazon for majority of shopping, I had minor anxiety over other Amazon stuff. Like my return rate and I had 2 incidents of being sent junk instead of the couple hundred dollar electronic. I’m sure they log how often it happens to a customer and it’s possible to not be stealing but still get booted if it happens too much.
- dewitt 6y agoI have no connection to any of the teams involved, but if you have problems getting this resolved, please send me a mail (my HN name @google.com) and I'll make it right.
- michaelkaufman 6y agoHi, I'm in the same boat. Do you mind if I write you too please? Thanks.
- dewitt 6y agoSure thing. Same address. And if it turns out that there's a pattern of a _lot_ of developers who all recently signed up for first-time Google Play Developer accounts just to monetize Chrome apps, I'd be maybe a little surprised, but more than happy to have helped identify an unexpected trend.
- simon_weber 6y agoIf I'm understanding the timeline correctly, it's not just recent signups but anybody who has wanted to monetize an extension from March until now, who paid under the expectation that the temporary ban would be lifted.
- dewitt 6y agoThanks! Mostly I just hated to think that a developer might fall into protracted customer support discussion asking for their account to be refunded, if the $25 turns out to be a hardship. I wouldn't expect this to impact many people, but you never know. I'd also be curious what happens if people ask the normal channels for the refund, of course.
- FriendlyNormie 6y agoWhy? What’s so special about him that he gets special treatment from you vs the hundreds of other people in his position?
- 6y ago
- molticrystal 6y agoDo a chargeback through the card/bank, they'll have a webform for you to submit it somewhere for contested charges. They'll ask for proof, just put you paid for a service that will no longer exist and include screenshots of the deprecation page.
- xyse53 6y agoHas anyone tried this with Google though? Is there a chance it can result in a locked account? And what would recovery be like?
- zaarn 6y agoYes. Your account is banned. Beg for forgiveness.
- invalidusernam3 6y agoDon't do this if you use any other google services on the same account (gmail, drive), there is a good chance your account will get banned
- seanwilson 6y agoYou can still integrate another payment system though, just not Google's one.
- _qulr 6y ago"There is no way to bulk export your existing user licenses, so you need to have your users help with this part of the migration."
- whoisjuan 6y agoThis doesn't even make sense. How are the users supposed to help? I think what google is suggesting here is to build a structure with all the license representations of all your users and then figure out how to enforce your licenses or recharge them or walk them through a process of migration to another licensing system which implies authorizing with their own accounts. At that point it's just easier to assume that all those users will churn. There's a lot of friction for the final users to go through all that process. Another thing is that once their licensing API is gone there's no way to enforce any license attached to a particular user, so what happens with users that don't go through the migration process that is supposed to be set for this? I think it would have been easier if they reached out to a couple of payment providers and ask them to write an adapter for their licensing system. That way all the developers could migrate to something else without affecting the users. But I doubt Google is willing to give any business to anyone.
- TedDoesntTalk 6y ago> This doesn't even make sense Sure it does. It’s a big ‘fuck you’. Imagine if you’ve built a lifestyle business with this.
- AnssiH 6y ago> How are the users supposed to help? By going to your site and authorizing it to access their subscription data with their Google login, like you said in the following sentence. That counts as helping, no?
- whoisjuan 6y agoMy question was rhetorical. Users can help, but they shouldn't. This is not their responsibility. This is the equivalent of Netflix interrupting my service because I need to help them to migrate their payment provider and they cannot do it if I don't do some manual process.
- SahAssar 6y agoAm I understanding it correctly that products paid for will stop working at the undecided "some future time"? And at that point there will be no official way to keep those extensions/apps working even if both the dev and the user wants to?
- gnicholas 6y agoThis is super annoying. I have two extensions, one which we've offered on Chrome and Firefox for years, and which uses Stripe for payments. The other we only offered on Chrome and was paid through the Chrome Store. Thinking of all the work we'll have to do to manage accounts/payments/etc on the PDF extension almost makes me want to scrap the whole thing. Most frustrating is the migration. We have been live in the Chrome Store for 7 years, with varying prices. When someone subscribes, they are grandfathered at that price forever. But when we create our own payment system, how do we know what price someone was previously paying? We can either make our new customers really happy by charging all grandfathered users the lowest price we ever charged, or we can upset a bunch of our older customers by charging everyone the current price (which is 5x the former). One fair way to accommodate everyone is charge the high price but if someone forwards us their receipt from the Chrome Store showing a different price, we apply a perpetual coupon to their account. But that will be super labor-intensive (and is susceptible to manipulation/abuse).
- summitsummit 6y agoand annoying. you're charging your most loyal users the cost of providing proof after all these years.
- mikro2nd 6y agoOr don't. Just ask users to tell you (without any burden of proof) if they've been paying less. Will a handful of users abuse this? Probably. My bet is that the vast majority are honest people -- particularly if the circumstances are clearly and simply communicated -- and will not take undue advantage. The upside is that you won't be pissing off the honest majority, and the cost is probably (admittedly unprovably) small.
- summitsummit 6y ago> My bet is that the vast majority are honest people what makes you believe this? feel like this is Hobbes vs Rousseau
- 6y ago
- moron4hire 6y agoI feel like we are getting nearly weekly examples of "the platform store will eventually kill your business". These platform stores wouldn't be anywhere without independent developers building the software to sell in then, and these big companies just shit on them.
- runawaybottle 6y agoIt’s so weird when you think about it. Does Valve and Steam sit there and wait for a successful game, copy it, stamp out competition, see if it works and decide to continue or not? Google represents one type of software thankfully, web. It’s craziness at the end of the day. Examining this behavior takes you into the pathological where no other being exists, Thanos incarnate.
- moron4hire 6y agohttps://voicesofvr.com/937-facebooks-desire-to-own-the-metaverse-conflicts-with-cultivating-a-developer-ecosystem-bigscreenvrs-grievances/ https://voicesofvr.com/937-facebooks-desire-to-own-the-metav... https://voicesofvr.com/944-guy-godin-on-getting-cloned-by-facebook-virtual-desktops-forbidden-wireless-streaming-features/ https://voicesofvr.com/944-guy-godin-on-getting-cloned-by-fa...
- mrkramer 6y agoWho says Google is destroying competition, they encourage competition by closing down their own stuff people love and use.
- Analemma_ 6y agoThat is destroying competition though. What Google does is enter a market which previously had a healthy economy of paid software, snuff out all the other players with a free version, and then abandon the space when they get bored. And the old economy can never come back, because there's hysteresis involved in the relative costs of starting from scratch versus keeping a functioning ecosystem alive, and because users now expect the software to be free and throw a fit if they're charged for it (especially if it's an ongoing cost, because god forbid developers can't live off a single payment for the rest of their lives) It's only gradually becoming common knowledge, but eventually we're going to collectively realize that Google killed small ISVs, and at the time we all cheered them on.
- lukifer 6y agoReminds me of the Google Reader saga: it took over from dedicated RSS readers due to convenience and experience, but when it was killed, the RSS ecosystem never fully bounced back.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y agoThere was never a healthy economy of paid browser extensions, neither before nor after Google's entry into the space.
- nashashmi 6y agoMaybe not paid browser extensions, but firefox had an amazing library of extensions and Chrome stole their thunder. Of course then Ff shot themselves in the foot by deprecating XUL and requiring developers rewrite their scripts, but with everyone on Chrome, very few people did.
- duskwuff 6y ago
- single_source 6y agoJust my luck... I created my extension and started monetizing it March of this year...
- codazoda 6y agoSee the other thread where a Google employee offers to make it right.
- YetAnotherNick 6y agoI appreciate that he had sympathy, but I think max he can do is refund $25. I think that that amount is the least of concern to the most developers.
- single_source 6y agoyeah, I've made my money back so I'm not as concerned about the $25, but there goes any chance of growing the revenue in any meaningful way. I am getting a kick out of all the people here saying that "no one pays for extensions". I've consistently made $50-100 from mine with no marketing whatsoever.
- mumblerino 6y ago$100 total? Doesn’t sound like a lot unless you worked on it for a day.
- single_source 6y agoSorry, no monthly.
- nsgi 6y agoDid you have to do much support?
- 6y ago
- stefan_ 6y agoI love that this "deprecation timeline" includes March 27 where this forgotten about payment API randomly broke.
- FridgeSeal 6y agoThe cynic in me thinks that might have been them doing a "Scream test" - break something, see if anyone notices (enough), if not, continue with getting rid of it. If it causes a stir, pretend it was just a once off issue.
- draw_down 6y agoYeah, or maybe it genuinely broke and then not much fuss was made.
- roryokane 6y ago"Broke" is an overstatement. The post says they only disabled using the API to sell new paid extensions or in-app items. Existing extensions were not affected, except extensions that added brand-new features since March and wanted to charge users separately for them.
- neximo64 6y agoGoogle is so protective about Chrome and Search they're scared about getting drawn into an Apple like Epic problem with antitrust consequences.
- _qulr 6y agoThey're already drawn in. Epic sued Google too. But Epic doesn't have a Chrome extension, and Google Play Store payments aren't similarly deprecated.
- neximo64 6y agoGoogle isn't really like Apple in the monopolistic sense. You're free to install your own app store on a Gphone. Chrome extensions are a bit different because they have to be signed with another store by Google anyway.
- _qulr 6y agoTechnically, you can sideload Chrome extensions with Developer mode, so I don't think that's much different from Android.
- jfrunyon 6y agoThe difference is that on Android you can get a different store, and the only thing you have to do is turn on dev mode and then download/run the apk. There seems to be a lot more friction to sideloading a Chrome extension: download, unzip, turn on dev mode, click a button & navigate to the unzipped files...
- lazyant 6y agoConfirming over and over: https://medium.com/@steve.yegge/dear-google-cloud-your-deprecation-policy-is-killing-you-ee7525dc05dc https://medium.com/@steve.yegge/dear-google-cloud-your-depre...
- brian_herman 6y agohttps://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/ This is my favorite site tracking stuff like this.
- inetknght 6y agoToo bad the site is just whitepage without javascript.
- mplewis 6y agoI'm sure they'd appreciate your pull request to fix that: https://github.com/codyogden/killedbygoogle https://github.com/codyogden/killedbygoogle
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jfrunyon 6y agoWh- why is that a bad thing? What about it would be made better by JS?
- 9HZZRfNlpR 6y agoIt's just a document, html is the reasonable choice for things like that.
- codyogden 6y agoIf you want to PR and then maintain 200 html list item components by hand, you’re more than welcome to join as a co-maintainer. :)
- nailer 6y agoDoes the Edge store still allow paid extensions?
- stickfigure 6y agoThe interesting thing here is that a commercial marketplace for browser extensions failed. That seems surprising - surely a marketplace for extensions to the most popular browser on the planet could bring in some revenue?! Is it just that nobody paid for things? Presumably they're going to keep running the chrome web store, so isn't a cut of paymens "free money" to them? Is there some big cost to this I'm not seeing, maybe too much fraud? I understand shutting down expensive products. It's weird keeping the expensive product running and shutting off the revenue model, no?
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y agoMy personal sense (not knowing anything internal about the product) is that uptake is extremely low. It also isn't free to run a product that accepts payment. You have to hook it in to a payment processor, handle fraud, handle a different expectation of support, have a bunch of custom code to handle the paid vs. unpaid case. At Google's scale, there's liability to consider, and various compliance and moderation issues that probably don't exist or are much less serious if you're providing the service for free. It's not a zero-overhead proposition.
- nitrogen 6y agoContinuing the speculation, I'm curious whether that uptake is low in relative or in absolute terms. A small percentage of Google scale is still a big enough business to make a lot of people rich and a lot more comfortably employed. In a hypothetical world where Google and Alphabet are broken up into a bunch of small companies, would the Extension Store Company be making enough revenue to be viable?
- rswail 6y agoAs a counter to this "it's not worth it because of overhead", Google already runs all of this payment/licensing infrastructure to support the Android Play Store, GSuite, GCP etc. The overhead for the Chrome extension store would be similar but much lower volume than the Android Play store, given that the attack surface (and thus APIs to monitor) are sandboxed by the browser, and the number of extensions is at least an order of magnitude lower than the number of Android apps. So at "Google scale" this is a rounding error in their payment/licensing space.
- simon_weber 6y agoHaha, this is so ridiculous and completely on-brand for Google at this point. I've run a Google Music extension for a few years now and would have absolutely no migration path since I don't have a backend -- but it doesn't matter since they're shutting down Google Music anyway! A related fun fact: accounting data exports for extensions have been broken for me (and I think all extension merchants?) since April 2018. I had to get the NY attorney general to write them a letter before they would actually respond to my support requests so that I could properly file my taxes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20588493 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20588493. I'm sure that will be fun this year!
- defen 6y agoHow does one get the attorney general to write a letter like this?
- simon_weber 6y agoOn a recommendation from a friend I filed a complaint online at https://ag.ny.gov/internet/online-forms https://ag.ny.gov/internet/online-forms. I wrote up the situation and attached a pdf copy of the support interaction I'd had with Google. It wasn't quick, but it did seem to work. Here's the timeline: - May 2018: I contact Google about being unable to export my accounting data from last month - November 2018: after nothing but "thank you for your patience" emails, I complain to the AG - early February 2019: I get a letter in the mail from the AG saying they'd forwarded the complaint to Google - late February 2019: Google finally gives me my data [edit: I'd had April originally, but that was a separate request].
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoSorry if this is obvious, but if I may ask, how did you file your taxes in the meantime, given that this took a full year?
- simon_weber 6y ago
- atum47 6y agoYep. I remember paying for the license to publish a joke extension I've made for chrome. Now I won't be able to make my money back, haha. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/crosstext/gnlobfhfakoiohcijojeffhonjpbmole https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/crosstext/gnlobfhf...
- atum47 6y agofun fact: this won't work on facebook anymore. I made this so I can write bad jokes on my Facebook, after the third one, facebook wrote a script that undo what my script does. So I wrote a patch to disable facebook script first. The Facebook wrote another script that undo what my script does, again. Then I just gave up. I was a super poor student back then, no point in engaging in such nonsense. I probably have the video showing this back and forth between me and facebook, if probably posted on my now deactivated facebook
- skinnymuch 6y agoI might be misunderstanding. Why would FB do anything about something you or any other single person is doing?
- atum47 6y agoWell, you tell me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrsKz1py7co https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrsKz1py7co
- skinnymuch 6y agoThanks! That’s pretty cool
- Lammy 6y agoGoogle should start announcing a month's worth of deprecations at a time to make it easier on us, like how Microsoft had to start doing Patch Tuesday during the Blaster/CodeRed era: https://www.cnet.com/news/microsoft-details-new-security-plan/ https://www.cnet.com/news/microsoft-details-new-security-pla...
- londons_explore 6y agoGoogle actually does this... They tend to announce deprecations in batches.
- exikyut 6y agoThis part is mildly technically amusing (to me, at least): > Exporting user licenses > - Migrate to another payments processor > - Migrate your licensing tracking > ... > ... You’ll need to use OAuth 2.0 with your users' consent ... . The general sequence is: > 1. Implement your replacement payment/licensing scheme. > 2. ... When I got to (1) I couldn't help but feel like whoever's tasked with dealing with this is going to feel like they've just been asked to go from zero to "now draw the rest of the owl" without even a line sketch to springboard off of. The bullet points before that are kind of similar as well.
- bjornstar 6y agoAre they still going to call it a "Store" when you can't buy anything on it? I always thought it was weird that my free extensions were distributed by a store. Expect Google to launch a new service with the same functionality and then deprecate the Chrome Web Store.
- jccooper 6y agoI remember when I had Google Checkout as my only payment platform. My condolences to all the developers who will now be blowing 1-3 weeks just to get back where they were.
- PascLeRasc 6y agoHow weird, I was just thinking about this today. I've had an optional "Buy for $0.99" button next to the three Chrome extensions I made back in 2016. It's brought in around $1.50 per month from the US, Australia, Japan, Russia, Ireland, South Africa, a ton of different countries. I'm not sure why people have been buying it but it always made me feel good to see that some little thing I made was liked by someone incredibly far away.
- jfrunyon 6y agoThis is a VERY quick deprecation period... wow. And I wonder how many people have developed something during Covid, in anticipation of Google turning back on "new paid items", and now can never use that effort. Moreover, it sounds like they're saying there will be no solution for having the user purchase an app prior to downloading the app - all purchase flows will have to be in-app? This sounds like it will make for terrible UX, with apps not disclosing (or people not noticing) that they have no free features until after you've downloaded them....
- jhoechtl 6y agoSomehow I have feeling google is loosing ground. Are there any figures which can support my assumption?
- rswail 6y ago"There is no way to bulk export your existing user licenses, so you need to have your users help with this part of the migration." I don't mind that Google has decided to stop running a payment/subscription/licensing service for web extensions. Even though it's basically just an API to their services that run the Android Play Store (or should be). But to not provide a way to export the information is pathetic.
- seanwilson 6y agoI think people are missing that you can still charge for extension, just not with Google's payment system. Anyway, called this well over a year ago - whenever anyone asked for tips on how to integrate Chrome payments into their extension I would strongly recommend against it. If you read the Chrome extension developers forums, you would have seen frequent posts about the payment system breaking, plus it was lacking lots of features like discount codes, letting you change subscription prices, being able to share purchases with Firefox (I wouldn't expect this from Google but it's a big negative) and letting you export user emails. It was clear Google wasn't interested in supporting the payments feature for a while. They've let it sit broken since the COVID lockdowns started which is completely insane (with unfortunate developers in the forums asking when it'll be fixed so they can integrate payments as if they think it's a one-off). For what it's worth, I use Paddle + Firebase for a website SEO auditor extension I run (https://www.checkbot.io/ https://www.checkbot.io/) and it works well, where Paddle addresses all of the downsides above. If anyone wants any tips on setting up something similar, feel free to message me. I know a lot of people recommend Stripe, but Paddle takes care of country specific tax and VAT for you which is a big plus for reduced admin. My extension was originally meant to be a Chrome App but they deprecated those before I launched haha.
- fattynoparents 6y agoHi I wrote you to sw@seanw.org from fattynoparents@gmail.com, could you please help me? Thanks.
- shaneapen 6y agoJust as expected! Does anyone know any good alternatives to handle payments and licensing, preferably something which doesn't require any upfront fee? Currently I'm using Gumroad for an extension I run (https://codegena.com/WAXP https://codegena.com/WAXP) but would love to know other options.
- karmasimida 6y agoGoogle Deprecation is the only Google service out lives Google Search.
- toyg 6y agoMakes sense: when life will end, Death will still be there.
- M2Ys4U 6y agoSurely death dies with life? Once there's no life, there can be no more death.
- toyg 6y agoIt very much depends on how you define Death - if it's "the absence of life", then it will stick around. Still, even if you go for "the termination of life", it will out-exist Life by an instant more. (For the record, I'm just parroting Neil Gaiman's excellent work on the Sandman saga...)
- levosmetalo 6y agoDon't. Just don't. Ever. Rely. On Google. For Anything.
- cblconfederate 6y agogo with apple, get App store serfdom. Go with google, you get smoother sailing until one day they cancel the sea. Moral of the story is dont build long term on these platforms. Use them as an onramp and get out. The web is still our most open precious platform. TBL never banned anyone
- TeMPOraL 6y agoThere's a quote that describes this so well I keep reposting it on occasions like such, ever since Twitter pulled one of their platform betrayals back in 2012/13: "Your civilization is based on the technology of the mass relays, our technology. By using it, your society develops along the paths we desire. We impose order on the chaos of organic evolution. You exist because we allow it, and you will end because we demand it." -- Sovereign, Mass Effect
- dzej_bi 6y agoI make a living by selling Chrome Extension. This one: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tradingview-alerts-to-mt4/pimpnnlpinhammfhgkfbmdohlijbhmpe https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tradingview-alerts... And I'm pissed.
- r14n 6y agoMe too
- londons_explore 6y agoGoogle sent an email to all Chrome Web Store app developers about this... Despite only a tiny fraction having ever used the payment system. Was that just carelessness? Why not only notify users of the feature you are about to deprecate? Do they not have records of which app developers have used the payments API?
- PascLeRasc 6y agoThanks for letting us know about the email, Gmail marked it as "unimportant" so I wasn't notified.
- hkt 6y agoIt's a real shame they didn't offer to parcel this off into a company in its own right that could be owned and managed by its users, as a stay of execution. I'm sure some would prefer that. The deprecation route Google takes destroy enormous amounts of value.
- jfoster 6y agoFrom the email: "When we launched the Chrome Web Store 11 years ago, there weren't a lot of ways for our developers to take payment from users. Today, there is a thriving ecosystem of payment providers offering a far more diverse set of features than a single provider could hope to. Now that our developers have so many great options to choose from, we can comfortably sunset our own payments integration." My takeaway: Google products & services exist to fill a gap until there's sufficient other options. As options increase, expect Google to "comfortably sunset" their solutions.
- animationwill 6y ago>> As options increase, expect Google to "comfortably sunset" their solutions. Read some of the other comments here. This is anything other than “comfortably” and will create a lot of pain & churn for Both the devs and users
- jfoster 6y agoExactly my point. Those are, however, the words Google used in the email they sent out about this.
- skinnymuch 6y agoWhy did you quote comfortably sunset? Are you indicating that this is anything but that? It isn’t clear.
- jfoster 6y agoI'm not personally impacted by this one, but I've been impacted by a very similar deprecation (Google Wallet for Digital Goods) by Google. Can assure you that anyone impacted by this deprecation isn't feeling comfortable about it.