How to monetize the extension without alienating anyone

[TheWebTech]

To anyone in the community who reads this - nothing in here is set in stone it's just brainstorming. If you have feedback on the ideas please feel free to chime in.

Individually I have sunk well over 150 hours into the extension - Gonzalo has probably spent a large chunk as well(no idea on his total). This is a lot of time, and energy I've actively promoted the extension as well and don't have a clue how much time has been spent on that.

I have a long list of features and functionality I would love to add to the extension, because the extension is free, it's hard to truly dedicate an amount of time to the extension. It makes some of my updates more reactive than proactive lately.

Before anyone gets all up in arms - I have no intention of turning this extension into an exclusively pay to use extension. I feel that's not a worthwhile endeavor and would ultimately kill the extension.

My personal belief - there should always be a free version of the extension and I do want it to stay Open Source.

I would not remove core functionality from the extension like the cachebuster.

If any existing features were to go paid the ones I'd think about doing that with are:

• Dark theme - this requires constant upkeep to keep up with HubSpot, in-fact I feel we are often behind in this right now. Might add a "Community Dark Theme" vs paid dark theme, the community one would stay open source. The idea being the community has to upkeep the community version but the paid one would be kept up-to-date.

• Custom Tab Titles - this is a new and advanced feature, that will require maintenance over time

• Developer Menu - Charging for this would drive more functionality that would tie into this, allow us to continue to improve it's reliability.

• special developer fonts added to the design manager settings, such as Hack and proxima code.

• design manager overwrite protection

• Instant toggle-able features - the dark theme and UI tweaks currently require a refresh of the design manager to take effect. We can make this instant without needing to refresh.

Any features that were added by other developers who do not wish to get involved in the paid version would be contacted and if they want their feature to remain free, it stays free.

Ideas of how to monetize -

• a paid alternate version like talked about above - would likely be a subscription or annual paid license where once the year ends you just stop getting the paid updates but continue with what you have.

• A sponsored version - a company can sponsor the tool for advertising in the extension in return. This would be in the pop-up and the options screen. The extension and all of it's features would stay publicly free.

• selling of anonymous analytics data of the extension - probably wouldn't work well, there isn't much for stats and it wouldn't be real valuable to anyone other than HubSpot. Would never violate user privacy if this was implemented. View privacy policy to understand what data is tracked.

• Donation functionality under options page - not likely to earn anything significant. I do like though it would better encourage community involvement.