Small Paid Extensions for Raycast, PowerToys Users, and Edge: The Uncrowded App Stores

Everyone building a browser extension builds it for Chrome. Everyone building a productivity tool builds it for the Mac App Store or as a standalone software-as-a-service (SaaS) product. And so the same two marketplaces absorb almost all the indie developer energy, while a handful of smaller ecosystems sit there with real users, real willingness to pay, and a fraction of the competition.

The opportunity data we track has been unusually persistent about this one. The core idea — small paid extensions for professional workflows in power-user ecosystems like Raycast and the Windows PowerToys crowd — has shown up six times in our tracking. And here’s the part that got our attention: the Edge developer-tools extension concept surfaced independently in two completely separate research pipelines we run, the app-niche one and the weekly ideas one. When two research streams that don’t share inputs converge on the same conclusion, we stop treating it as a fluke.

Why thin competition beats big audiences

The Chrome Web Store has well over 100,000 extensions. If you launch there, you’re invisible unless you spend on marketing or get lucky. The Edge Add-ons store carries a small fraction of that count, yet Edge ships preinstalled on every Windows machine on earth and holds a meaningful slice of desktop browser share — heavily weighted toward corporate users, which is to say, people whose employers pay for tools. An extension that would rank on page nine of Chrome’s results can sit near the top of its category on Edge.

Raycast is a different flavor of the same math. It’s the launcher app that has quietly become default equipment for a huge share of Mac-using developers, designers, and startup operators. Its extension store now supports paid extensions, which is recent — meaning the monetization layer exists but the shelf is still mostly empty. The audience is small compared to Chrome’s billions, but it’s dense with exactly the people who pay $5 to $20 for a tool that shaves friction off their day. These are users who already paid for a launcher. The filter has done its work before you arrive.

The Windows side works similarly. PowerToys itself is free and open source, but the community around it — people who remap keyboards, script window layouts, and treat their PC like a workshop — is the Windows equivalent of the Raycast crowd. Utilities that extend or complement that workflow, sold directly or through the Microsoft Store, face far less competition than anything aimed at general consumers.

What to actually build

The winning shape here is narrow and professional. Not another color picker or pomodoro timer — those are free everywhere and nobody pays. You want a tool that sits inside a specific work workflow, where the buyer can point to time or money saved. A few patterns that show up repeatedly in the research:

• A Raycast extension that wraps a professional tool’s application programming interface (API) — deploy status, on-call schedules, invoice lookups, ad-account stats — so the user never opens a browser tab for it again.
• An Edge extension for developers or analysts: environment switchers, API inspectors, session managers for people juggling multiple client accounts.
• A Windows utility that automates a niche professional annoyance — batch file operations for a specific file type, window layouts for trading or support workflows.

Pricing is small on purpose. You’re charging $5 to $29, one-time or a low annual fee, and the entire pitch fits in one sentence. The business model isn’t one hit; it’s a portfolio. Three or four extensions, each earning a few hundred to a couple thousand dollars a month, built by one person who shares code and infrastructure across all of them. In our tracking, that portfolio pattern beats the single-big-swing pattern for solo developers almost every time, because any one product flopping doesn’t end the story.

Distribution is also unusually cheap in these ecosystems. Raycast users hang out in a known Slack and follow the store’s featured lists. PowerToys enthusiasts read a handful of Windows blogs and subreddits. Edge’s store has categories shallow enough that a decent listing with good screenshots gets found organically. You don’t need an audience or an ad budget; you need a good listing and a couple of honest posts where these people already gather.

The honest caveats

We’ll be honest: the ceilings here are real. A Raycast extension is never going to be a million-dollar product on its own. The platform could change its store terms, take a bigger cut, or ship your feature natively — platform risk is the tax you pay for cheap distribution, and it never goes away. Microsoft could decide to promote a competing extension. You’re building on rented land in every one of these cases, and you should build with that assumption: keep each product small enough that losing it stings but doesn’t hurt.

One more constraint worth naming: research before you build. Every one of these stores has categories that look empty because nobody wants what would go there, and categories that look empty because nobody’s gotten around to it yet. The difference is demand evidence — forum threads asking for the thing, an existing free tool with complaints, a Chrome extension with 50,000 users and no Edge port. Spend a weekend hunting for that evidence before you spend a month coding. If you can’t find anyone asking for the tool anywhere, the empty shelf is a warning, not an invitation.

There’s also the support load, which people underestimate. Paid users email you. A $9 extension generates the same “it doesn’t work on my machine” tickets as a $99 product, and across a portfolio of four products that adds up to real hours. Budget for it or the whole thing stops being fun.

Who this isn’t for

If you can’t code, this one’s not for you — no-code tools don’t produce store-quality extensions, and hiring developers eats the economics of a $12 product instantly. It’s also a poor fit if you need the income to be large and fast, or if maintaining several small codebases across platform updates sounds like torture rather than tinkering. And if you’re the type who only gets motivated by big visions, a portfolio of small utilities will bore you within a quarter.

But if you’re a working developer who wants a side business that compounds — where product one teaches you the store, product two reuses the payment code, and product three launches in a weekend — this is one of the cleaner openings the data we track has produced this year. The cross-pipeline convergence on the Edge idea in particular is the kind of signal we rarely see. Six appearances, two independent research streams, thin competition, and audiences that have already proven they’ll pay. Start with the workflow that annoys you personally at work. That’s almost always the right first product.