No. 27 Tirupati ticket-booking plugin: free, the most polished build, stalled at 1,000 users

On 2026 Sep 25, a developer who had signed up for GitHub just two days earlier shipped a free Chrome extension, TTD Govinda Autofill (Free), to the store. The same day they opened a YouTube channel and posted one 1-minute AI-voiced tutorial. The extension fills in every family member's details in one click when booking on the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams (TTD) site in India. By Nov 6 it had 1,000 users and 2 five-star reviews. But more than twenty extensions were already doing the same thing before it. It's worth studying as a cautionary tale: the demand is real and the build is decent, but it arrived late, the category has no moat, and the platform is still cracking down.

On the 24 of each month at 10 a.m.

On ordinary days, Tirumala Temple gets 6–80k worshippers a day, over 250M visits a year (tirupatiguide.com). The most sought-after ticket is the ₹300 Special Entry Darshan: TTD releases roughly three months' worth of slots at 24 a.m. on a fixed day each month (usually around the 10th), and they're gone within seconds. A post on Reddit r/TirumalaDarshan from Aug 18 says October's tickets open "w.e.f. 24.07.2026, 10:00 AM".

The hard part isn't speed, it's the form. You can book up to 6 people at once, and each person needs a name, age, gender, ID type and Aadhaar number (passport number for overseas Indians). TTD doesn't save pilgrim details, and the browser's built-in autofill doesn't work well on this kind of dynamic form. So every month, a crowd types the same ID numbers into the same form at the same moment, frantically, 6 times over. That's why this niche exists.

What it does

Store the family's details in the browser ahead of time, and one click fills the booking page. It covers a wide range of booking types: ₹300 darshan, Arjitha / Virtual Seva, accommodation, senior-citizen darshan, Srivari Seva (including photo and blood group fields) and Group Seva, plus the NRI passport pop-up. It also offers multiple family profiles, a countdown to ticket release, pre-submit checks such as Aadhaar validation, an Alt+A shortcut, 6 languages (English, Telugu, Hindi, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam), and a practice form you can try without logging in to TTD, along with a tutorial for using the Firefox Android version on a phone.

It wants people to remember two lines in particular. The official site says it's "a free Chrome extension offered as a seva to Sri Venkateswara Swamy", a free offering dedicated to the god. The YouTube description reads: "It never presses Continue, Submit or Pay, never solves a CAPTCHA and never jumps a queue." Data stays on the device and can be encrypted with your own password using AES-256. The last line of the video is "Om Namo Venkatesaya 🙏".

Both reviews are short: Amruth Gowda gave 10-06 "Works great", and Sampath Kumar gave 10-23 "Awesome". The only comment on the video (10-09) asks "How to using mobile". Many users only have a phone.

More than twenty already came before it

Searching the Chrome store for listed plugins whose names or descriptions include TTD, Tirumala or darshan turns up 27, and 25 of them were published after December 2025. Sorted by user count (Chrome store, 11-06):

How blatant the name-piggybacking is: the store also has "TTD Govinda Autofill Express Pro" with 352 users, which looks like the paid version of it but is actually made by another developer, praveen.gudivaka, with no connection to it.

Scale tracks launch date almost exactly: the two that went live in December 2025 pulled in 40k users; the July launches sit at 6,000–9,000; anything launched after August sits at 1,000–2,000, no matter how well it does. Like Mivaan from the same period, it's 1,000, under half of August's QuickFill and Form Helper. On the store, the 11-01 to 11-06 user count hasn't moved at all (1,000+ is what the store rounds to; the real number is between 1,000 and 1,999). Firefox DAU 78 (Firefox Add-ons store, 11-06).

Where these 1,000 people come from

There are only three entry points we can find:

• That YouTube tutorial. The channel @ttd-autofill has just this one video: 7,329 views, 23 likes, and the channel has 7 subscribers (YouTube, 11-06). Few subscribers but lots of views suggests the plays come from people searching "TTD autofill" on YouTube; we can't tell whether it was paid promotion. At 1,000 users, this video is probably the main entry point (inferred).
• The "related extensions" bar on other extensions' store pages. The recommendation bars on the store pages of Pilgrims Manager, QuickFill, Quick Paste and others, each with 30k users, carry "TTD Govinda Autofill (Free) 5.0". Traffic from the leaders spills over to it, and the "(Free)" in the name rides on the anger at the leaders charging money. A Reddit thread is even titled "TTD Autofill extension isn't free anymore".
• Store search. The name takes all four words TTD, Govinda, Autofill and Free (inferred).

What we couldn't find is also worth noting: the author has never posted on r/TirumalaDarshan (the authors of QuickFill and others have), and there's no coverage on X or in the media. The Telugu Instagram and Facebook pages promote other products.

TTD is blocking it, and everyone is racing to fix it

On Oct 13, the X account @ttd_updates posted "TTD website now blocking autofill extensions", with 142k views and 2,400 likes. A Reddit post titled "TTD has blocked auto-fill extensions" appeared at the same time. According to the TTD Form Helper update notes, TTD's forms now "ignore every event that the browser itself did not generate": only input the browser produces counts, and values an extension writes in programmatically don't.

Responses varied. Form Helper announced it was fixed; Quick Paste gave up and sent users back to Ctrl+V; Govinda shipped an update on Oct 31 to 2.6.4, whose notes say it "waits for the ID number box to unlock, and checks that every value stays filled", so it's still being adjusted. We didn't verify whether it can still fill the TTD site.

This is what the category really looks like: the platform changes its frontend once, twenty-odd extensions break together, and then they're all fixed together. Whoever is slowest to fix loses rating.

Where the money comes from

No. It's free, the store has no in-app purchases, the website has no pricing page, and the author presents it as a devotional offering. The paid players in this category are others: Autofill Assistant and Quick Paste sell day or year passes, and Quick Paste's site says "500+ devotees". But charging brings complaints and "free alternatives" straight away. Govinda is itself one of those alternatives.

If it were you

D: Don't go after this one. The Tirupati booking niche already has 27 extensions. The leaders have been up for nearly a year and have taken 40k users; anything launched after August stays at a thousand or two however good it is; the platform keeps actively blocking, and every redesign means rebuilding. There's no revenue to speak of, and anyone who charges gets undercut by a free clone. It is itself an example of "the best craftsmanship still doesn't matter".

Who it suits: only someone who wants to practice, or to build a small extension they can talk about on a CV. Or someone who is already in a community that has to grab a particular government form every month (local news accounts, service centres, group admins) and has an audience ready to go.

Who it doesn't suit: indie developers who want to make real money or build something big; people who don't speak the local language or aren't part of this community.

How to do it: don't build the 〔28th〕 one on TTD. What you can borrow is the playbook: pick a different "government or public form that opens at a fixed time" that nobody owns yet. First confirm the browser's built-in autofill is bad on that form and the official site doesn't store your details; then check whether the store already has similar extensions. Follow its approach: keep data local only, never press submit for the user, never touch captchas (this makes it harder for the platform and the store to target you); offer a practice page that works without logging in; and plan the mobile version in advance.

How to get users: on launch day, publish a 1-minute tutorial in the local language and tap into YouTube search traffic; take the search terms people would type; post in Reddit, Facebook groups and local blogs. Govinda skipped this step, and QuickFill, which posted on Reddit at the same time, got twice the users.

When to get in: it only makes sense to enter when a form has just appeared and there are fewer than three or five similar extensions in the store. The lesson from this category is that those who arrive in the first two months take most of the users, and those who arrive six months later are left with scraps.

What would show this read was wrong: (1) TTD ships its own feature to save pilgrim profiles, and the whole category dies at once; (2) the reverse: if Govinda grows to five or ten thousand users over a few months by surviving the blocks and staying free, it would show that in this kind of category, a late entrant can still win by fixing fast and building well, and this verdict would be too pessimistic.

In one line: when a single form gets twenty-odd people writing extensions at the same time, the early ones take the users and the late ones take the ratings. Enter this kind of niche when it first appears, or don't enter it at all.

Data and sources

• Store data: Chrome Web Store page and reviews page for TTD Govinda Autofill (Free) (11-01 to 11-06:1,000 users / 2 ratings); Firefox Add-ons store (11-06, DAU 78).
• Product description: official site adi95-dev.github.io/ttd-govinda-autofill (includes practice form, mobile tutorial, privacy policy).
• YouTube: video "TTD Govinda Autofill (Free): fill TTD darshan booking forms in one click – 1-minute guide" (published 2026-09-25, 11-06 7,329 views).
• Blocking: X @ttd_updates 2026-10-13; several Reddit r/TirumalaDarshan threads (search excerpts); store pages and websites of TTD Form Helper and Quick Paste.
• Competitor figures come from each product's Chrome store page (11-06). Pilgrim numbers come from tirupatiguide.com.