I'm a solo dev with zero users right now, and I just spent an afternoon on a decision most people would've hardcoded in five minutes.
Here's the setup. NotebookBloom is my Chrome extension for Google's NotebookLM. At launch I don't want to charge for much — I want people to actually use it, tell a friend, leave a review. So the plan is: only cloud sync (Google Drive backup) is Pro on day one. Everything else — flashcard export to Anki, citation export, bulk import — free.
But "free on day one" implies "not free forever." Once there are enough users, I want to flip some of those to paid, one at a time, watching what happens.
And that's where I hit a wall that only exists for extensions: there is no server runtime. My extension runs in the user's browser. So if I write "is this feature paid?" as a hardcoded if in my code, then flipping it later means: edit code → rebuild → upload to the Chrome Web Store → wait for review[你查到的审核时长，如 "usually under a day, sometimes 3"].
Think about that. A pricing change — arguably the most business-critical lever I have — would be stuck in a review queue. That's absurd.
