Putting Moises into the YouTube page: a Filipino developer built the most feature-complete practice plugin, then users surged to 2,000 and fell back to 500

Chord Lens is a Chrome extension that shows chord fingerings and synced lyrics next to a YouTube video, and can split the song into 6 stems on your own computer. It launched in September and reached about 500 users and 20 five-star reviews in two months. Its feature set is broader than its rivals', but nearly all its users came from the author posting in Facebook groups one by one. A wave pushed it to 2,000 in late October, and within a week it fell back to the same level. This piece covers what it got right, why it didn't take off, and whether the space is still worth entering.

"Stop guessing"

In 2026 Oct 7, Pinoyfreecoder, a Facebook page teaching programming in the Philippines, posted a "community project" recommendation: "One of our viewers, Jethro Malate, sent us the ChordLens he built… Instead of always guessing what chords you're hearing, this tool makes it easier to identify chords and analyze songs." It closed with "Support projects that come out of our own community." The post got 77 reactions and 13 shares. One commenter asked: "parang Moises pero Chrome extension for YT?" (Like Moises, but a Chrome extension for YouTube?)

That comment describes the product more accurately than the store listing does. Before that, Jethro had already posted the same copy himself in App Builders PH, a Philippine developer group (Sep 19), in Guitar Lover (Oct 3, tagged #WorshipTeam, aimed at church worship teams), and in groups for musicians in Georgia, USA.

The store reviews come from the same crowd. Jester Miñon wrote on Sep 22: "ganda ng extension. Accurate chord finder" (great extension, accurate chord finder). Jeff Oliva wrote "the STEM tool was incredible!!!" On Nov 2, Michelle Grant commented that she had already subscribed to Pro.

What it is

After installing, open any YouTube video and the page shows the current and next chord. You can pick fingering diagrams for guitar, bass, ukulele, mandolin, or piano, or switch to Nashville numbers. Lyrics scroll with the song. It detects key and BPM automatically, and offers a capo transposer and chord simplification. You can change pitch without changing tempo, change tempo without changing pitch, loop an A-B section, and have a metronome follow the beat. The full chart can sit in a sidebar or be printed as a lead sheet.

The heaviest feature is stem separation: vocals, drums, bass, piano, guitar, and other, 6 stems computed on your own graphics card via WebGPU. You can solo or mute each one and make a backing track in one click. The official site says only the video ID is uploaded and key, speed, and stems are all computed locally. Beyond the extension there's a web Studio, a PWA for the phone home screen, and a Mac app that only supports Apple Silicon.

The listed developer is Freedom! Family Limited, a Hong Kong company running a YouTube creator network (MCN), formerly any.TV, with many Filipino staff on the team. How Jethro relates to the company (employee, internal incubation, or contractor) can't be determined from outside.

Where 500 users came from, and where 2,000 went

Figures before October come from the user curve on extops.dev. November figures come from daily Chrome Web Store scrapes.

The source of the first 400 users is clear: the author posting in groups, plus the Pinoyfreecoder recommendation. The curve rises steadily with no day skipped.

On the evening of Oct 18, the official page posted a 4-second Reel: "1,000 MUSICIANS. ONE BIG MILESTONE." It got 1,100 views and 18 shares, ending with "Help us reach the next 1,000!" Over the next 4 days users jumped from 523 to 2,000, followed by another post, "2K STRONG." Then within a week it fell back to 525, and in those 4 days only 1 more ratings were added.

There's no direct evidence of how that wave came about. The Reels may have been paid promotion, a large group may have shared them, or Freedom!'s own creator network may have sent traffic (inference). What's clear is the outcome: the Chrome Store's user count roughly reflects activity over the past week. A climb followed by a drop back to the same level means these users installed it, tried it, and stopped using it.

Other channels are nearly empty: over the last 90 days, searching "chordlens" on X returned 0 posts. There's nothing on Reddit, Product Hunt, or Hacker News, no related TikTok videos, and no press coverage. Two official YouTube Shorts exist, with unknown view counts.

One more signal: 20 reviews for 500 users, a review rate of about 4%, where a typical extension sees 0.5% to 1%. Filipino names dominate the reviews, which fits with early users being mostly acquaintances and community members.

How it makes money

chordlens.app, 11-05.

The pricing has two things worth copying. First, the cost structure: free-tier stem separation runs on the user's own GPU, so each extra free user costs almost nothing, and server costs are only incurred for paid cloud separation. Second, the anchor: Moises' Pro is $5.99, Chord Lens' Pro launch price is exactly $1 cheaper, and it's only $1 more than its own Premium.

Revenue isn't public. Reviews mention people subscribing to Pro, but it's unlikely that 500 weekly active users support much subscription revenue. Some users have also asked in reviews for the free tier to drop usage limits and limit features instead.

Who it's competing with

Chrome Web Store, 11-01 to 11-07; Moises and Chordify figures are their own claims.

This table shows two things. First, the demand is real: Transpose alone reached 1M users just for pitch change, speed, and looping, and UG's extension has 3.2k users at a 100 rating. Second, the combination of "chords on YouTube in place plus stem separation" has produced at least two full versions in 2026 years, Riffloop and Chord Lens, and both stalled at a few hundred users. The idea isn't scarce. What's scarce is a way to pull people in and keep them. No big brand has built this shape yet, so the gap is there, but the people in it aren't getting fed either.

Why the most complete feature set didn't take off

Feature depth solves "is it good once installed," and the reviews show it does: some people used it to find chords for songs with no published charts online. But practice happens one song at a time. Today you want to learn this song, so you search "song title chords," get UG and Chordify chart pages, and nobody thinks of the extension they installed weeks ago. Chord Lens has no such search entry point, so every user depends on the author pulling them in group by group, and they leave once they've learned a song. The 2,000-to-500 drop is that problem in magnified form.

If it were you

C: You can learn from it, but copying it isn't worth much. Two full-featured extensions already do "YouTube plus chords plus local stem separation," and both are stuck at a few hundred users. Acquisition is what's holding them back, not features. Alongside them stand UG (an extension with 100k users), Moises, and Chordify, and search terms like "song title + chords" are already saturated by their chart pages. Another feature-matched extension would most likely stall at a few hundred users too.

Who it suits: people who already have a musician audience, such as a guitar teaching channel with tens of thousands of subscribers, a worship team training organization, or a musical instrument e-commerce seller; or developers who can build lots of SEO pages and treat the extension as a retention tool rather than an acquisition tool.

Who it doesn't suit: solo developers hoping to grow mainly from organic store traffic, and anyone without GPU optimization experience who can't handle a 70 MB model bundle and browser compatibility issues.

How to do it: stop building a "fuller" version and go after the half it skipped: the entry point. There are two paths worth testing. ① Change the audience and serve a single niche, such as worship songs (fixed setlists, practiced every week, used collectively by church teams), or a single-language pop catalog (Filipino OPM, Indonesian, Vietnamese songs, which human-made UG charts don't cover and AI recognition fills). ② Turn each recognition result into a public "song title + chords" web page, so users' own use builds search entry points for you, with the extension only handling playback alongside YouTube.

How to acquire users: for a niche, go where its people gather: church music ministry Facebook groups, partnerships with guitar cover channels on YouTube. For the SEO route, build batches of song chord pages, with a "play along on YouTube" extension button at the bottom of each. Keep the free tier on local compute like it does, so you don't pay for servers.

When the window closes: if Moises, Chordify, or UG ships an official "chords and stems in place on YouTube" extension, the window for this exact shape closes. It's still open now.

What would mean this read is wrong: ① Chord Lens or Riffloop grows past 5,000 users through organic traffic before year-end, showing features alone can drive growth, in which case head-on competition becomes worth it; ② the October 2,000 wave is shown to have come from Freedom!'s own network, and a repeat push also retains users, meaning the path needs channel resources that individuals can't match; ③ a large brand releases a similar extension first.

Data and sources

• Store page and reviews: chromewebstore.google.com/detail/iedoccahfccciahmalgjakejfmbnahnp (11-06 read, version 0.29.3,11-02 updated, developer Freedom! Family Limited); November user counts and review totals come from daily Chrome Store scrapes.
• User curve from September to October: extops.dev.
• Pricing and terms of service: chordlens.app, chordlens.app/terms (11-05); trial details: heartors.com/app/chordlens.
• Facebook: Pinoyfreecoder recommendation post (10-07), Chordlens page "1,000 MUSICIANS" Reel (10-18), Guitar Lover group post (10-03), App Builders PH group post (9-19), Georgia musicians group post.
• Competitors: Riffloop website and store page, Moises scale (scored.tools), Chordify (jamistry.com); other extensions are from Chrome Store data.
• Discussion on X: keyword search over the past ~90 days, 0 posts.