PlugThis - Create your own Chrome Extensions by chatting with AI
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You wanted a Chrome extension that would save you 15 minutes a day. You searched the Chrome Web Store, and it's not there.
Now you can just describe it in plain English, and PlugThis builds it for you. The code is yours. Want changes? Chat. Need login or a database? Connect Supabase. Ready to publish? We generate the icons, screenshots, and listing copy the store asks for.
Everyone else builds web apps. We build Chrome extensions.
Replies
Congrats on the launch Udaya and team. 🥳
Building chrome extension is not trivial, you need to understand chrome APIs, manifest, permissions and what not. Just having a super easy way to create an extension with 3-4 prompts makes PlugThis worth it. I’ve created few extensions already and the experience was a breeze.
Wonder if the coverage for other browsers is in the roadmap
PlugThis
@cjgiridhar Hi Chetan! Thank you. Glad to have you as one our early users. Your feedback was the reason we built chrome store readiness, asset generation and one click connect to update extensions directly on chrome webstore. Take a bow 🙇 As of now we are focussed on chrome and edge browsers. May be later we might do Safari and Firefox.
PlugThis
@jill_camhi_osinoff First, thank you for trying out Plugthis.
Let me assist you with your question.
Please input the idea you have for the extension and click on the black arrow button.
I have pasted a screenshot below for your reference, if you still have questions please reply I ll assist.
@nefer_ai I entered in the prompt but there is no black arrow visible. I’m on mobile.
PlugThis
@jill_camhi_osinoff Hi apologies, currently plugthis.ai works best on desktop. Can you please try creating the extension from a desktop device.
Building a niche-focused SaaS myself, I love the "Lovable, but for X" positioning — going narrow lets you own the whole workflow. Curious: does PlugThis help with the Chrome Web Store review process too (manifest permissions, privacy disclosures)? That's usually the part that kills momentum for first-time extension builders.
PlugThis
Hi @kojimajunya Yes yes we do :D PlugThis tells you your extension's chrome webstore readiness, helps you generate assets and in one click push changes live to CWS.
Please do check out PlugThis and take it for a spin.
This hits different for anyone doing VC or market research day to day. Half of my job is skimming through founder profiles, pitch decks, and competitor sites, and there's always some tiny repetitive capture step (pull a founder's LinkedIn into a tracker, flag a company against a thesis, snapshot pricing pages) that's too small to justify a real dev cycle but too annoying to do by hand fifty times a week. Being able to just describe that in plain English and have it live as an actual extension I use daily is exactly the kind of 'nowhere to build this' gap you're describing.
Curious whether you're seeing people build extensions for research/data-gathering workflows like that versus more consumer-facing use cases.
PlugThis
Hi @andre_ajemian one of the main issues we wanted to tackle was daily repetitive workflows. You just described the uses cases, for which I have personally built an extension.
It takes in my Product profile, I define a ICP then it scores every person I see on X after doing a web search on them telling me if they are a good fit for my product.
People are building extensions across the board, the data workflows are there but the long tail is so huge. Ideas and problems, I dint even knew existed are getting solved.
Please do try to build for your exact itch, If you need any support, please reach to us via in app chat.
"Nowhere to go to build a simple extension for yourself" really nails it — I've got a handful of 15-minute browser itches I never build because the manifest/service-worker setup kills the momentum every time. Since the code is real MV3 that I own, does a build stay Chrome-only, or can the same prompt target Firefox/Edge too? Curious how far the "one thing we do" focus stretches across browsers.
PlugThis
@lennoxbeflying Glad that line landed, and go build those 15-minute itches, they're exactly the sweet spot.
On browsers: today a build is Chrome-first, and the store side is built specifically around the Chrome Web Store. But since everything it generates is standard Manifest V3, the same output already runs on Edge with little to no change, because Edge is Chromium underneath. So realistically it's Chrome and Edge from one build.
Firefox is the honest gap. It supports MV3 but with enough differences in APIs, manifest quirks, and signing that "mostly works" is not good enough, so I would rather do it as a proper target than half-ship it. So the "one thing we do" focus stretches cleanly across the Chromium browsers now, and Firefox is a deliberate next step rather than a checkbox we pretend to have ticked.
Is Firefox the one you'd actually need, or would Chrome and Edge cover your itches? That genuinely helps me prioritize.
this is REALLY timely, i just built a feature spec for my app and a simple chrome extension was part of the design - I want an extension that will scrape monthly statements from accounts (banking, credit cards, etc) and send them to my app automatically....I am non-technical Lovable app builder so i was not looking forward to trying to figure this out on my own....sounds like you might just have the solution i need. Does this sound like a use case your tool can handle?
PlugThis
Hi @crystal_harrison PlugThis should be able to handle this, give it a shot on the platform if you run into challenges, please send me a email udaya@plugthis.ai I ll hop on a zoom call and troubleshoot it for you.
@nefer_ai will do that here when i get off this call!
@nefer_ai So i am super excited....It only took me about 10 minutes in total (assuming i had done it contiguously) and i built and deployed to developer mode and tested my extension of importing a bank statement to my app.....it was so fast and worked like a charm. I loved the tutorial and side bar check list of things to do....that made it so easy as i was a little confused at first, i had to do a little trouble shooting but the tool helped me through that.....very exciting....now i just need to work through the publishing part so users can use it in production mode instead of developer mode.....I thought for sure i would spend hours/days/grey hairs on this....so glad i found this tool! great job building something that it TRUELY needed!
PlugThis
@crystal_harrison You have no idea how much happy this comment makes us happy :) Thank you, for sharing this with us.
Do the plugins stop working if you stop paying for the subscription? Or you just can’t modify them further?
PlugThis
@jasonrdunn Great question, and the answer is the good kind: your extensions keep working.
What you build is a real, standalone Chrome extension. The code is yours to download, and once it's installed or published to the store it runs on its own with no dependency on PlugThis servers. So if you stop paying, nothing you already shipped breaks.
The subscription is about building and modifying, generating new extensions and iterating on existing ones inside the tool. Pause it and your live extensions keep running exactly as they are, you just wouldn't be creating or changing more until you're back.
So it's full ownership, no kill switch. Your extension, your code, yours to keep.
@saurabh_dey1 great, thanks, that is great to hear!
Congratulations on the launch ! It is really an awesome product. I used it to create an hourglass timer for my kid who can't tell time yet. I could easily change the UI and make other changes to the extension. Was really surprised at the overall design and quality of the result. Is the mobile app on the roadmap? @nefer_ai
PlugThis
@nefer_ai @sonal_waghchoure This genuinely made me smile, thank you so much 🙏 Really glad the design and quality held up, and that changing the UI felt easy.
On mobile: quick honest nuance, because "mobile app" can mean two things. If you mean building extensions from your phone, making the builder itself work well on mobile is very doable and worth considering. If you mean the extensions running on mobile, that's trickier, since Chrome on mobile doesn't really support extensions the way desktop does, so that limit is on the browser side, not us.
Which one were you picturing? That tells me a lot about how to prioritize it.
@nefer_ai @saurabh_dey1 Either of the two is a way to use it on a mobile. A mobile Chrome extension or a quickly deployed APK. For a simple app that I made, it made sense to use it on a phone anywhere rather than sticking to a laptop.
PlugThis
@nefer_ai @sonal_waghchoure That's a really sharp way to frame it, and honestly a direction I had not weighted enough until you said it.
You are right that the two paths are different beasts. A mobile Chrome extension is largely blocked by the browser itself, Chrome on Android just does not run extensions like desktop, so that one is not really ours to fix. But the APK idea is the interesting one. For a simple, self-contained tool like your hourglass timer, the logic does not actually need to be a browser extension at all. It could be exported as a lightweight standalone app or PWA you install on your phone and use anywhere.
That is genuinely a different build target than what we do today, we generate Chrome extensions, but it is a smart adjacent direction: describe a simple tool, get it as an extension for desktop AND as a mobile app for your phone. The fact that you naturally reached for "just let me use my thing on my phone" tells me a lot, because that is exactly the friction worth removing.
Noting this properly. Thank you for pushing on it, and for the hourglass timer, that is still my favorite thing anyone has built with it.
Honest question: Claude Code or Codex can already build Chrome extensions better than it , with unlimited revisions and customization. What's the real differentiator here — what's the magic that those general-purpose tools can't replicate? And are you ready to survive that race? I love innovation, but if the existing giants can do the same thing better and cheaper, it's hard to justify investing time in a niche tool. I think you understand where I'm coming from, but I'm genuinely curious to hear your answer. Thanks!
PlugThis
@riponcm Fair question, and I'd rather answer it straight than dodge it.
You're right that Claude Code and Codex can write extension code, and for a developer who already lives in a terminal and wants maximum control, that's a genuinely great path. I'm not going to pretend we out-code a frontier coding agent at raw flexibility. So the differentiator isn't "we generate better code." It's that we're not really in the codegen business, we're in the "get a published extension" business.
Three things that gap covers:
First, the user. Claude Code assumes you're a developer with Node, a build setup, and the patience to wire tooling. A huge number of people with a good extension idea can't or won't do that. For them a general agent isn't a cheaper option, it's a non-starter. We meet the person who says "I don't really code" and still get them shipped.
Second, the last 10%, which is where extensions actually die. A general agent hands you code and stops. It doesn't scope your permissions and flag the ones you declared but never use, doesn't give you a live preview of your popup and side panel without loading unpacked, doesn't write your Chrome Web Store listing, permission justifications, and privacy disclosures, and doesn't publish to the store for you. That whole pipeline is the part people abandon, and it's Chrome-specific, not general coding.
Third, purpose-built means fewer wrong turns. Reviewers on this very launch mentioned general LLMs hallucinating manifest v3 configs and handing back outdated structures. Because we only do one thing, the output stays pinned to current MV3 rules, validated and sanitized, so you spend less time debugging setup and more time on your actual idea.
On surviving the race: general agents will keep getting better, and honestly that helps us, because our value was never the token generation. It's the opinionated, end-to-end workflow around a specific outcome. A frontier model is a better engine, but most people don't want an engine, they want the finished car, plus someone who knows exactly how to get it past inspection.
Different job, different user. I think that's a defensible place to stand, and I appreciate you pushing on it.
Chrome extension generation by chatting is a neat angle. The part I'd worry about as a user is permissions review — it's easy for an extension to ask for too much. Do you show a plain-English diff of requested permissions before build/export?
PlugThis
@xiaosong001 Good instinct to worry about that, it's exactly the failure mode we wanted to avoid.
Yes, before you publish you get a plain-English breakdown of every requested permission, with a reason for each one generated from your actual code, not a generic template. So instead of a raw manifest list, you see "this permission is here because the code does X," and you can edit any of it before it goes out. On top of that, any permission the manifest declares but the code never actually uses gets flagged as "no code usage found, consider removing," so over-asking gets caught rather than justified.