Solo dev rebuilds price detection after trust issues in 780-user Chrome extension

Price Tracker is a small subscription product built into a Chrome extension. After a trial, the free tier tracks up to 3 items; the paid Premium tier adds unlimited tracking, faster price checks, history charts, browser/email alerts, and currency conversion. The product currently has 780 users and 7 ratings on the Chrome Web Store averaging 5 out of 5.

It is not a large business yet, but it has grown large enough that reliability problems now surface across very different stores and countries. Version 5.3.3 was released today after a full rebuild of the price-detection logic. The motivation was not a feature request but trust: if the tracker mistakenly picks up a monthly installment price, a refurbished item's price, or a temporary zero-price glitch as the real price, a customer can lose trust and leave immediately.

The changes include prioritizing structured page data (JSON-LD) when it matches the current product URL, favoring new-product offers over used, renewed, or open-box alternatives, and deprioritizing installment/financing prices, net prices, crossed-out prices, and recommendation-card prices. Selectors that break after a store redesign are now automatically rediscovered and repaired, and dynamic pages are monitored continuously while loading rather than checked only after the page finishes loading. Reported edge cases are still being fixed.