Google Chrome

Honey extension loses 3 million Chrome users after being exposed for shady tactics

Ben Schoon | Jan 3 2025 - 7:40 am PT

PayPal’s Honey has been a massively popular Chrome extension for years, promising to find coupon codes and save consumers money, all without costing a dime. However, a recent video exposed shady tactics by Honey, and has led to over 3 million Chrome users uninstalling the extension.

Honey’s promise to users is that it will help users “score the lowest price” for digital retailers by “[looking] for and [applying] digital coupons and promo codes.” It’s easy to see the appeal there, but as with anything, it doesn’t do this for free. Instead of charging customers, Honey, and extensions like it, have always taken advantage of affiliate programs which pay out a fee for referral sales. So, by using Honey, you’re effectively telling the retailer that Honey is the one that sent you and, as such, Honey gets a small kickback from your purchase.

This practice was met with blowback through a recent video from MegaLag, where the video showed evidence that Honey will replace an affiliate code from another source – such as a YouTube video or website like our own – with Honey’s, in turn taking credit for the sale and “stealing” the fee from that other referral. It’s called “last click attribution” and is always how this has worked, but many users and creators alike were clearly unaware of this.

More worrying in the video, however, were reveals of how Honey is doing the exact opposite of what it promises to do.

Rather than finding the “best” coupon codes as it promises, it was revealed that Honey works with retailers to purposely hide better codes and only show the ones that retailers would prefer users to see. That’s why many have noticed over the past few years that Honey rarely delivers steep discounts. Despite that, though, a shady dealing of Honey is that if you interact with the extension at all, whether it finds a code or not, Honey will still “steal” attribution for the sale.

The MegaLag video detailing Honey’s scam has amassed over 14 million views since it was posted on December 21, which has led to many users uninstalling the extension. By looking at The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, the Chrome Web Store shows that at least 3 million users have uninstalled Honey recently, as the extension had over 20 million users before the video was posted, and is now down to 17 million, dropping roughly 2 million in just the week the video was posted.