10 months free = $0. Added a $4.99 tier on day 295: first sale in 19 days, $574.39 in two months
A year ago today I uploaded my first extension — ChatGPT Pro Tools — to the Chrome Web Store, and then spent ten months not asking anyone for money. It launched with one tiny feature: pinning chats in ChatGPT. Funny detail: five months later that exact feature shipped natively in ChatGPT itself, so I deleted my own launch feature and kept going.
On day 295 I finally added a $4.99/month tier. Nineteen days later a stranger paid — and that first customer is still subscribed.
Year one in honest numbers:
• $574.39 collected in two months of charging, $209.65 MRR
• 44 active subscribers
• 2,144 installs currently enabled, 4.7 rating
• 47 Google clicks to my site in the first three months → 862 in the last 28 days
• $0 spent on ads
The biggest lesson was about reading the stats page, and the first screenshot shows why. In July the weekly-users graph climbed toward 16,000 and I honestly thought I’d caught a trend — I refreshed that chart like a slot machine. Then over two days the public counter settled from 10,000+ down to 2,000+, and when I decomposed the data, the whole spike was auto-update pulses re-counting dormant installs. The tell was in the second screenshot: installs per day didn’t react at all — no matching spike, just the same gradual climb as the months before. The real, boring number: 2,144 people who actually keep it enabled. So now I treat weekly-users as a mood ring and judge everything by installs, uninstalls and the enabled count.
What actually brought users in surprised me. Early on I generated a dozen long-tail blog articles — one prompt each, honestly — hit publish and forgot they existed. Months later I opened Search Console and realized nearly all of my traffic was landing on exactly those forgotten pages. That’s the third screenshot. One-prompt articles had been quietly carrying the whole funnel. Plan for year two: write them properly this time — because if the throwaway versions rank, better ones should rank higher.
One question for anyone further along: if you were in my position right now, what would you do on the marketing side?