The Naming Problem Nobody Warns You About
I've talked to a lot of Chrome extension builders. Same story every time. Build the thing in a weekend. Ship it. Then burn three days trying to name it, because "TabMaster" is gone, "QuickTab" is gone, and every permutation of "tab" plus "pro" got claimed years ago by someone who never even launched.
Naming an extension isn't like naming a normal SaaS. Your name has to survive a tiny icon. It has to stand out in a search result buried among fifty other extensions. The Chrome Web Store gives you maybe four words before people bounce. So you need something short and ownable and sticky, and that's a brutal needle to thread when every decent three-letter and four-letter .com got scooped up a decade ago.
Why Domain Squatting Hits This Niche Extra Hard
Extension builders get squeezed harder than most, because good names here have to be short. Nobody types a 20-character domain to check out your side project. So you end up on GoDaddy watching an auction for a name that's basically your product, watching it climb into four figures because a bot decided it had "brand potential."
The better path is quieter. Domains expire constantly, and nobody notices. Old side projects. Abandoned MVPs. Extensions that got 80% built and then died in a drawer. Somebody registered a great name, shipped nothing, let the renewal lapse. That domain doesn't need an auction. It just needs someone to actually want it.
What I'd Actually Look For
The $99 Flat Price Thing
This is why I built NotRenewing. Every domain there costs $99. Flat. No auction, no bidding war against a squatter's script. You won't find MailChimp's old domain in there. You'll find short, clean names that expired quietly and never made it back to market, priced like a nice dinner instead of a down payment.
Two weeks from shipping with no name? That's the move. Go browse what's expiring before someone else grabs it. Pick something clean. Get back to writing manifest.json instead of arguing with yourself in the shower about brand names.
Ship the extension. Let the domain be the easy part, for once.