A 200K-subscriber how-to blogger built a free plugin for internet-cafe owners

Bihar RTPS - Auto Save & Fill is a Chrome extension for Bihar's government certificate portal: it stores one applicant's caste, income, and residence forms locally, fills them in next time with one click, and restores the data after the site errors or drops the session. It went live in July 25, reached 30K users in just over two months, and none of the five or six similar tools that appeared at the same time got past 1,000. Anyone could build the feature; it won because its maker is a YouTuber those users already watch every day.

July 28 morning

2026, July 28, 8:13 a Telegram channel called 'Bihar RTPS Auto Fill - Free Extension' posted a video link. A minute later, the next message went out in Hindi to agents across all of Bihar:

'Tired of typing the same details over and over on the RTPS website? Server error or session expired and the whole form has to be redone?… Enter the caste certificate details once, and income and residence certificates fill in automatically with one click. The extension is completely free.'

The last two lines became the extension's whole strategy after that: 'If this extension helped you, please give it 5 stars and a comment.' 'Forward this message to every RTPS operator, CSC center, and cyber cafe.'

The same day, the YouTube channel Online Process published a tutorial, 'ServicePlus / RTPS Auto Fill Extension', tagged #CyberCafe #DataEntry, with chapters running from 'what the extension is' to an 'income certificate demo'. The channel has 208K subscribers and 700 videos, usually covering Bihar ration cards, PAN cards, birth certificates, and job applications. Its viewers are cyber-cafe and CSC (government-authorized village service center) operators who file documents for ordinary people. By Nov 6, this tutorial had 46,824 views; the next day a mobile tutorial followed, showing people without computers how to install the extension in a phone browser, with 3,083 views.

The Chrome Web Store developer is 'SK ZONE', but developer replies in the store reviews are signed 'online process', the first Telegram post pointed to that channel's video, and the extension's listing embeds both videos. It's the same person on both sides, which is almost certain (inferred; the author never said so publicly).

What problem it solves

Caste, income, and residence certificates from Bihar are required for school, scholarships, civil-service exams, and reserved-seat applications. Ordinary people can't file them online, so they go to cyber cafes and agent offices, where operators often file all three for the same person. Most fields across the three forms overlap, and the government's RTPS site is notoriously slow; social media is full of 'RTPS server down' posts and videos. A form half-filled when the session expires means starting over.

The extension does three things: it autosaves as you type; after a drop or refresh it restores the data, even selecting correctly through cascading dropdowns like 'state → district → block → ward'; and after filling the caste form once, it carries the details over to the income and residence forms with one click. One operator can store profiles for many applicants, and export/import moves them to another computer. The extension is only 37.5 KB, keeps data on the local machine, and has never been updated since launch.

Tools like this existed before, but they were sold on YouTube or needed a manual unzip to install (in October 2025, videos were already asking 'how much does the RTPS auto-fill software cost, is there a free one?'). This was the first to go on the Chrome Web Store, openly advertising '100% FREE'.

How the 30K users came in

Its own channel. The main tutorial's 47K views were the biggest source. That audience was already the target user, so almost nothing was wasted.

Operators forwarding to each other. The Telegram channel had only 133 subscribers and each post got three to four hundred views, so it wasn't large itself; its role was supplying ready-made forwarding copy, and both posts say 'forward to your RTPS, CSC, and cyber cafe groups'. The real spread happened in invisible WhatsApp groups (inferred).

Five-star reviews in launch week. The store has 49 ratings averaging 4.78 stars, nearly all written between Jul 30 and Aug 13, right after those two 'please give five stars' posts. Reviews are short: 'VERY GOOD', 'Superb Boss', 'YES BRO ITS WORKING SMOOTHLY… YOUR PROJECT IS SAVE MY TIME'; many reviewers' names are shop names, like 'Neha Computer and Cousmatic' or 'online works'. The rating count together with the user count held its spot in store search for 'Bihar RTPS'.

Other creators recommend it in passing. Searching 'RTPS auto fill' on YouTube and Instagram turns up a dozen-plus Hindi videos with titles like 'Jati Aay Niwas 1 click'. The topic already draws traffic in the agent circle, but which videos promote this particular extension couldn't be verified one by one.

The growth curve is steep: about 5 weeks after launch it reached 20K, around Oct 5 it hit 30K, then it stayed at that level for a month (third-party stats from extops.dev; the Chrome Web Store shows only two significant digits above 10K, so the 30K tier may still be growing slowly). There are no signs of paid ads, and no English media or X posts mention it.

The product isn't flawless either. In Aug 2, the channel ran a poll, 'Is the extension useful?': 57 people voted, 67% chose 'useful' and 40% chose 'not useful'. The only negative review said it doesn't work on slow connections, and the developer replied, 'it'll work once the connection is faster'.

Where the money comes from

The extension charges nothing, has no in-app purchases, and the store listing has no website. The money comes from elsewhere (all inferred):

• YouTube ad revenue: the two tutorials add up to 50K views, and the new subscribers they bring count too.
• PAN card business: the extension's listing links to a subdomain of pancardekyc.com, a site that sells instant PAN card (India's tax ID card) white-label services and recruits 'retailers, distributors, and super distributors' with registration fees of ₹11 to ₹299. The extension's users are exactly those retailers. In Aug 2, the same Telegram channel ran an ad: 'Lost your PAN card? You can find your PAN number using only your Aadhaar number', linking to the site for ₹30 a time.

In other words, the free extension is a customer-acquisition funnel: it pulls Bihar's agents into the creator's channel, then sells them paid services they need.

Who it's competing with

Copycats matched the features within ten days, and some did more, but all stayed under 1,000. The same thing happened on other Indian portals: the Chrome Web Store has more than a dozen form-filling extensions for grabbing Tirumala Temple (TTD) darshan slots; the leader has 10K users and the rest mostly a few hundred. Indian visa and IRCTC train-ticket booking tools each have one or two with over ten thousand users (Chrome Web Store, 11-06). On every portal, one or two players take most of the market and the rest split the scraps.

The biggest risk is the website itself. In Nov 6, some government-services bloggers posted videos saying Bihar's caste, income and residence certificates will move to a new website (unverified). If that happens, this plugin, which has never been updated, could fail entirely, and users will go to whoever adapts to the new site first.

If it were you

One-line verdict: Don't build another one for Bihar. It's already taken by someone with a 200k-subscriber audience, and the five or six copycats after them never took off. What's worth learning is the combination: a slow, clunky government or booking portal + a crowd of agents who fill the same forms there every day + a content channel they already watch. Without that channel, the plugin itself is barely worth anything.

Who it's for: someone already inside the agent, CSC or cyber-cafe circles in an Indian state, with a channel or group of their own; or a developer who can partner with a creator like this and share the upside. Being able to read Hindi or the local language is a prerequisite.

Who it's not for: people who only write code and know nobody in the Indian agent scene; people who want to make money from the plugin itself (these users are used to free tools, and the copycat that tried a Pro tier has the lowest rating); anyone who isn't willing to keep fixing it every time the government site changes.

How to do it: find a portal nobody has built for yet. Bihar's ServicePlus system is used by several states' government sites. Chrome Web Store searches for the North Pradesh and Jharkhand equivalents don't show any real-scale alternatives. Prioritize forms agents fill in every day, with lots of repeated fields and frequent timeouts. The feature set can match this one: auto-save, recovery after timeouts, carrying one form's data into the next, multiple profiles, export and import. The extra step that sets you apart is photo and attachment upload, plus a fix shipped the same day the site changes.

How to get users: first find local YouTube creators who explain government services, then offer them credit and revenue share, or just make them the developer. Within three days of launch, publish a tutorial video and a mobile tutorial. Create a Telegram channel and write a caption that can be forwarded straight into WhatsApp groups, so operators pass it along to each other. In the first two weeks, push hard for ratings to secure your position in store search. Put the money outside the plugin: channel ads, and services operators need (documents, top-ups, white-label PAN services).

When to get in early: before the first person with a channel does. From Bihar's example, a portal's plugins went from first listing to a flood of copycats in about ten days. A portal's move to a new website is also a window: every old plugin drops to zero at once, and whoever adapts first takes the lot.

What would mean you got it wrong: ① a blogger posts a tutorial and after two weeks users are still under a few thousand, meaning agents in that state don't struggle with this portal as much, so the pain isn't that sharp; ② the government speeds up the site itself, or adds CAPTCHA or anti-automation, so the plugin has to work around it to function; ③ three months on, the paid services beyond the plugin sell zero orders, so it's just a free tool that saves other people time.