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Freemium Notice ​

From free to freemium ​

Lightning Autofill v12 has a ton of improvements and is now built on the more secure and future-proof Manifest V3 (MV3) browser extension platform. However, with this major update, Lightning Autofill has also shifted to a freemium service. We tried to keep Lightning Autofill free for as long as we could, but as its user base grew, the time and energy required to manage it became too much to handle while holding down a full-time job. To make matters worse, Google announced that all extensions must migrate to the MV3 platform by June 2024, or they’ll be removed from the Chrome Store. There was no realistic chance for us to support our users on the MV2 extension (called Autofill at the time) and rewrite it as an MV3 extension in our spare time by the given deadline.

Hence, in 2023, we made the difficult and risky decision to leave our IT jobs to focus on Lightning Autofill entirely. To cover our expenses, we implemented a donation system based on a nag banner inspired by Wikipedia. After doing this for a year, it became obvious to us that even with the generous donations from some of our loyal users (thank you 💖), our savings were steadily getting depleted, and this passion project would come to a sad end if we didn’t do something about it. Since we don’t collect or sell user data, introducing paid plans was the only way forward for the continued development of Lightning Autofill, as it is now our sole source of income. After 14 years of being completely free, this is how we arrived here.

We understand this may be difficult for many of our long-time users, but by embracing freemium we can introduce new features and provide support for an even better user experience. We remain committed to your privacy, so Lightning Autofill continues to have no tracking whatsoever. Thank you for your understanding and ongoing support as we embark on this exciting new chapter with Lightning Autofill. 🙏

Breaking changes for existing users ​

The change to the freemium model brings about a few changes that would be considered “breaking changes” for existing users. These changes are outlined below.

  • After executing 10 profiles, Lightning Autofill will stop working until the next day. Upgrade to the Plus or Pro plan for unlimited autofills.
  • JavaScript rules will no longer execute unless you upgrade to the Pro plan.
  • JavaScript variables will no longer work unless you upgrade to the Pro plan.
  • Default field matching has changed from regular expressions (regex) to plain text match. Existing rules should automatically migrate from ^pattern$ to /^pattern$/.
  • Comments syntax has changed from /* Comment */ to # Comment.
  • Autofill() has been replaced with the AUTOFILL action (v13 and later). See Actions for more information.
  • injectJquery() has been removed, so if you have rules that rely on this internal function, replace jQuery with vanilla JavaScript.
  • The “Auto-import from the URL” option has been removed. Upgrade to the Plus or Pro plan to manage your data in Google Sheets (cloud sync).

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