I’ve decided to share the journey behind my Price Tracker extension with you. It all started with my enthusiasm for AI. I was an early adopter of ChatGPT, and from day one, I dreamed of it being able to code well. I had so many ideas I wanted to realize but couldn’t, simply because hiring developers was too expensive and I didn’t have the budget. For a long time, I felt the potential was there, but it was still “not there yet.” However, once Sonnet 3.7 and Gemini 2.5 Pro came out, everything seemed to change. Those were the models that could actually start writing code well. Being in the AI bubble on social media, I saw tons of projects, but none of them seemed useful. It was just AI games barely anyone played, a shit ton of tests, etc. I thought to myself: what if I actually tried building something useful for people? At that exact same time, I was wanting to quit my job, but I needed to generate some passive income so I’d have something “stable” under my feet. Those two things mixed together perfectly. I asked myself: what would a lot of people actually find useful, so my potential audience would be big enough? The first thought that popped into my head was that it should be related to money. Probably not money-making, but maybe money-saving. Cha-ching - a price tracker. But… how do I market it? How would it work? I started looking into ways to get users for free, because I just didn’t have the budget to run paid ads or a proper marketing campaign. A Chrome extension was the answer that kept popping up. The Chrome Web Store provides free, SEO-style traffic and organic installs. With all of that cleared, I dived in. To start, I decided to use Claude 3.7 through a custom-built tool I created to handle full files, because at the time, there weren’t many similar solutions. At first, the process was painful. There were tons of bugs, and I couldn’t implement most of the features I wanted. The initial creation phase took about 8 weeks just to get a “quite useful” version I wasn’t ashamed to put on the store. I spent around $200-$400 just building that first version. Then Gemini 2.5 Pro came out. It was slightly more creative than Claude 3.7, which allowed me to add some new features. But it was still a grind - the models failed a lot, and it required heavy prompting. Still, I pushed through. Every time a new, stronger model dropped (like Sonnet 4.5 or Gemini 3), I checked if my codebase could be improved, what I could fix, or what new things I could implement. For a long time, there was one specific feature my paid users kept asking for when I asked for feedback: email notifications for price alerts. It seemed impossible until tools like Google’s Antigravity and Claude’s Desktop came out. On top of that, the newest models were way smarter at coding, ideation, and execution. That finally allowed me to implement some seriously complex stuff - like a full-blown dashboard where you can see everything (instead of just a basic popup), rate conversion across a huge amount of different currencies, and, of course, those highly requested email notifications. Today, I’m not ashamed to share that this entire project was vibecoded. Because even with vibecoding, I put a massive amount of time and effort into it, and I overcame a lot of obstacles along the way. Honestly, I don’t think anyone should be ashamed of vibecoding a project these days. You simply have to be genuinely passionate and invested in what you’re building - which I am. For those who are here for the numbers, here are some screenshots (missing the first couple of days after launch; also, there was a bug in November that spiked the numbers to unrealistic levels): https://preview.redd.it/knaa016uerpg1.png?width=1065&format=png&auto=webp&s=5b74359e62ba80c878d9292cab32230920554790 https://preview.redd.it/e5i31jpyerpg1.png?width=1058&format=png&auto=webp&s=9d09b5e4d424a107142a8c1b76c2cad55a1eac9b https://preview.redd.it/9u01j2i5frpg1.png?width=1119&format=png&auto=webp&s=498480a4f596201b974d34f44c1a2fbacafb941a As for the earnings, I’ve sold around $200 worth of memberships over the past year. The start was very slow, and honestly, it’s still slow. But for the last couple of months, I’ve been getting about one premium annual membership per month on average (which costs $29.99), plus the occasional cheaper tier. So right now, it brings in around $30-$40 a month. These definitely aren’t the numbers I was hoping for, but it’s still a nice validation. It proves to me that all the work I put into this wasn’t for nothing, and that some people genuinely find the extension useful. Was I able to quit my job because of it? Of course not. But the situation at work changed a bit, and I stayed on with a better contract… at least for now. The moral of this story? Well… there is no moral. Just a journey that I wanted to share :) Link to the extension: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/price-tracker-price-drop/mknchhldcjhbfdfdlgnaglhpchohdhkl?authuser=0&hl=en P.S. My current goal is to upload screenshots of the most recent version of the extension. It looks slightly different than what’s in the photos because those show an older version, but I honestly just hate doing visual stuff… :) submitted by /u/iPCGamerCF1
Originally posted by u/iPCGamerCF1 on r/ArtificialInteligence