PayPal’s Honey has lost millions of users over shady practices
Users are reacting negatively to questionable practices discovered last year regarding Honey, the discount code service.
Tekef
What occurs when a popular money-saving service harms its key stakeholders? Naturally, there is a rapid decline in users. This is the situation with PayPal’s Honey.
PayPal’s Honey, once a popular Chrome browser extension that promised to save users money by finding coupon codes, lost approximately 3 million users, dropping from 20 million to 17 million. This decline followed a viral exposé video released in December 2024, which revealed several deceptive practices.
The controversy centered on two main issues: First, Honey was replacing affiliate links from content creators with its own, effectively “stealing” commissions. Second, instead of finding the best coupon codes as promised, Honey was allegedly collaborating with retailers to hide better discounts in favor of retailer-preferred codes.
PayPal acquired Honey for around $4 billion in 2020, making this scandal especially significant for the payment giant. In direct response to the controversy, Google updated its Chrome extension policies in March 2025 to restrict how browser extensions can utilize affiliate codes. The new policies require transparency and explicitly prohibit extensions from injecting affiliate links without providing a tangible benefit to users.
The fallout from the scandal has led to multiple class action lawsuits, including one filed by content creators Sam Denby of Wendover Productions and Ali Spagnola, as well as another by the technology review outlet GamersNexus.
In January, Honey’s Chrome browser extension unexpectedly vanished. During that period, attempts to access the extension on the Chrome Web Store resulted in an error page stating, “This item is not available.” The extension has since been restored and is now available for new downloads.
If you’re not yet comfortable using the Honey Chrome extension, there are several alternatives available. Capital One Shopping, formerly known as Wikibuy, is one of the main competitors to Honey. It offers similar features such as automatically applying coupon codes, tracking prices, and comparing prices across different retailers. Another option is Rakuten (formerly Ebates), which not only applies coupons automatically but also provides cashback on purchases that can be transferred to your account within 24 to 48 hours. Other alternatives include RetailMeNot and Shopper.com, among others.
