Honey is a widely used browser extension that promises to save users money by hunting down coupon codes. It doesn’t really do that, though, as it was exposed for shady tactics in December. But, despite the blowback, Honey has actually added more users, growing back to 18 million on Chrome alone.
The Honey “scam” was first exposed in late December 2024 through a viral YouTube video that detailed the company’s shady business tactics. A significant portion of the attention on these tactics has been around the damage to online content creators, as Honey “hijacks” affiliate codes by taking advantage of “last click attribution” polices of these various programs.
However, the bigger impact to users was revealed towards the end of the video, as Honey, as it turns out, doesn’t do what it promises to do.
The appeal of the extension has long been that it promises to find coupon codes for various websites and deliver “the best” ones to you. Anyone who has used the extension recently, though, can quickly tell you that it rarely seems to find meaningful discounts, if any at all. Rather, Honey works with many businesses to hide big discounts and instead pass along smaller coupon codes to appease shoppers, as was discussed in the recent viral MegaLag video.
After being exposed for these tactics, Honey’s Chrome extension lost around 3 million users, dropping from “20,000,000+” in November 2024 to “17,000,000+” in early January 2025. In the time since our previous report, we’ve tracked that Honey has jumped back up to “18,000,000+” last week, and has kept that status over the past few days on the Chrome Web Store.
Are you still using Honey?
More on Chrome:
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- Chrome for Android has doubled its Speedometer score
- Report: Google preps ‘Jarvis’ AI agent that works in Chrome
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