I built a Chrome extension for rendering and exploring JSON data

I was working on another project that had me constantly hitting API endpoints in the browser, and every JSON viewer extension I tried was either ugly, slow, or weirdly cluttered. So I built my own.

JSON Master is a Chrome extension that detects when a page contains raw JSON and replaces the entire page with a clean, interactive viewer — collapsible nodes, syntax highlighting, click-to-copy paths, image previews for URLs it recognizes.

Under the hood it's a Vue.js app that takes over the DOM, rendering the JSON tree with a recursive component that handles arbitrarily nested structures. Getting that to perform well on large payloads took some work — the naive approach chokes pretty quickly once you're past a few thousand keys.

What made this project interesting to me was taking a personal tool and shipping it as a real product. I built a license key activation system backed by Firebase Cloud Functions, listed it on the Chrome Web Store, and launched on Product Hunt and Indie Hackers.

The launch was a bit messy — there was a bug in the license activation flow where people could pay but couldn't actually unlock the extension. I got a handful of sales and a sharp lesson in testing the full purchase path before going live. It was the first software I ever charged money for — the whole pipeline from extension to payment to license validation, built end to end.