Infatica prices its service based on the volume of web traffic a customer is seeking to anonymize, from $360 a month for 40 gigabytes all the way to $20,000 a month for 10,000 gigabytes of data traffic pushed through millions of residential computers. The end result is when Infatica customers browse to a web site, that site thinks the traffic is coming from the Internet address tied to the extension user, not the customer’s. Infatica’s code then uses the browser of anyone who has that extension installed to route Web traffic for the company’s customers, including marketers or anyone able to afford its hefty monthly subscription charges. An extension maker who agrees to incorporate Infatica’s computer code can earn anywhere from $15 to $45 each month for every 1,000 active users.Īn Infatica graphic explaining the potential benefits for extension owners. So when a company comes along and offers to buy the extension - or pay the author to silently include some extra code - that proposal is frequently too good to pass up.įor its part, Infatica seeks out authors with extensions that have at least 50,000 users. Yet extension authors have few options for earning financial compensation for their work. But here’s the rub: As an extension’s user base grows, maintaining them with software updates and responding to user support requests tends to take up an inordinate amount of the author’s time. Some of these extensions have garnered hundreds of thousands or even millions of users. Singapore-based Infaticaio is part of a growing industry of shadowy firms trying to woo developers who maintain popular browser extensions - desktop and mobile device software add-ons available for download from Apple, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla designed to add functionality or customization to one’s browsing experience. This story examines the lopsided economics of extension development, and why installing an extension can be such a risky proposition. A company that rents out access to more than 10 million Web browsers so that clients can hide their true Internet addresses has built its network by paying browser extension makers to quietly include its code in their creations.

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