To recap the situation thus far, Honey has amassed millions of users over the past several years on the promise of finding coupon codes for various online stores. The free extension saw wide advertisements and was eventually purchased by PayPal in 2020 for $4 billion.

In December 2024, a video on YouTube by the channel MegaLag exposed Honey for two shady practices. The first was how the extension took advantage of affiliate codes. Honey has always used affiliate programs to subsidize its service, but the video revealed that the extension would hijack these programs – removing affiliate codes from other refferers such as online creators and website – even if it didn’t have coupon codes or cash back to offer in return. The practice was working behind the scenes with businesses to control which codes would appear to Honey users, effectively directly lying about its promise of finding the “best” coupon codes on the web.

That video amassed over 17 million views, and Honey has now lost over 4 million users on Chrome.

As we reported in early January, Honey had lost around 3 million users immediately after the video went viral, but ended up gaining back around 1 million later on. Now, as of March 2025, Honey is down to 16 million users on Chrome, down from its peak of 20 million.

This drop comes after new Chrome policy has taken effect which prevents Honey, and extensions like it, from practices including taking over affiliate codes without disclosure or without benefit to the extension’s users. Honey has since updated its extension listing with disclosure, and we found that the behavior shown in the December video no longer occurs.

Are you still using Honey?

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