No, honey is not legal: you should uninstall the honey extension

There are a few lines that usually hold up to quite a bit of scrutiny in technology. “If it’s free, you are the product” and “if it seems too good to be true, it probably is”. A recent one YouTube video from MegaLag confirms that this is the case for Honey. Honey is a “free” web browser extension (Chrome extension, Firefox extension, etc.) that is widely promoted by influencers who promise discount codes to you as a consumer. But MegaLag’s investigations have revealed a number of shady practices that are likely to cost you money.

What is Honey (the web browser extension)?

Honey was founded in 2012 before it was leaked on Reddit and went viral. By 2014, the extension had seen explosive growth with over 900,000 users already using it. It is understandable why.

Online shopping had also grown during this period and discount codes emerged as a strong level for online stores to draw. Discount codes simply let businesses give generic or personalized discounts to customers and encourage them to make a purchase.

The promise to customers was that simple. Install Honey and make sure you always get the best deal. Honey promised that it would automatically apply discount codes even if you missed them. Something that has happened to me before and something that is extremely annoying.

Honey went on to raise millions of dollars in funding as the potential for the platform grew. Potential that PayPal discovered, bought the company in 2020 for $4 billion and renamed the app PayPal Honey.

Why honey is bad for consumers

While the promise of Honey is simple, in practice the extension was actually misleading customers, benefiting both companies and Honey. This is what MegaLag revealed in its investigations.

A lot of the hype around PayPal Honey was centered around you always ensuring you’re getting the best deal just by having the extension installed. Honey promised to always have the latest and greatest discount codes, so why search for them on the internet yourself.

Well, I have worked in many e-commerce companies and I can tell you that discount codes cause as many problems as they solve. Every single time a discount code is created, the same conversation takes place.

“Okay, we’ll create a 50% discount code for existing customers, but what happens if this leaks on Reddit?”.

The idea with PayPal Honey is that should a discount code leak and work, Honey will pick it up and make sure that every customer with the extension gets that discount, even if the company selling it didn’t really intend for it to happen.

But then PayPal Honey started partnering with businesses. This means that companies will offer honey-specific discounts, such as “HONEY10” to give a 10% discount. MegaLag’s video shows instances where the Honey extension would promote a 10% discount and ignore discount codes that offered greater savings.

Suddenly, the extension that promised to save you money ended up costing you money by lulling you into a false sense of security and misleading you with smaller discounts.

Influencers are also caught by honey

A large part of MegaLag’s research does not focus on consumers at all. It actually focuses on influencers and specifically influencers who have promoted Honey like Linus Tech Tips and Marques Brownlee.

In a rather technical deep dive, MegaLag shows us how Honey steals the credit for sales from influencers and platforms that use affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing is really common, we use it here at Goosed. Basically, when we like a product, we’ll recommend some places you can buy it. If one of the sites you can buy from offers affiliate programs, we use a special link to the product on that site. You don’t pay anything extra, but this link means we get a tiny percentage of the sale in return for referring you to that store.

We haven’t noticed anything specific ourselves, but what MegaLag shows in his video is quite shocking. When customers click on affiliate links from a YouTube or media outlet like ourselves and they’ve installed the Honey extension, through some programming magic in the background, Honey rewrites the sale to itself and takes credit from the influencer or platform that did all the work.

I won’t go into depth on this element, even though it is the core of MegaLag’s video. I’m not on a personal vendetta here to protect a revenue stream for Goosed. I’m more annoyed with how Honey misleads consumers with lowball discount codes to protect businesses.

Need to uninstall Honey?

I just uninstalled Honey, but I have to admit I probably should have uninstalled it anyway. It rarely comes up with any actual discount codes for me and is a waste of space on my browser toolbar. But this video was the last straw. When good ideas are taken over by big companies for big money, the consumer rarely benefits.

Tax, in its youth, was a good idea. But PayPal Honey has grown into a Trojan horse. A Trojan horse where I’m not entirely sure who loses the most from companies, influencers and other businesses, or you, the consumer.

All I know for sure is that if you want the best deals all the time, you’re better off doing some research instead of just relying on Honning.

MegaLag’s honey video

I highly recommend watching MegaLag’s full video on this. It’s just over 20 minutes, but it will show you the shady side of online businesses. As I started, if something seems too good to be true, your defenses should be on fire.

In part of the video, we also see MrWhoseTheBoss promoting Honey while wearing a Huel t-shirt. Double warning!

If you enjoyed his video and appreciate his investigative journalism, please consider joins MegaLag’s Patreon.