A free, unlimited WhatsApp number exporter: 5-star reviews, only 8 people a day

Tooly is a Chrome extension that exports contacts and group members from WhatsApp Web to Excel, CSV, or vCard in one click. It's free, with no limit on entries, and the data never leaves your computer. It was built by a front-end engineer in Jakarta as a side project. The work is detailed, and all 13 of its reviews are 5 stars. But its category on the Chrome Web Store has 60 similar extensions with roughly 380k users combined. Four months after launch it has 559 users, adding about seven or eight a day. This piece covers why it keeps people, why it can't pull new ones in, and whether you should enter this category.

One Russian review

In Oct 2026 27, a user named Lusha left a review in Russian: "Great! I downloaded 1,300 contacts from WhatsApp that weren't saved on my phone. All free, took less than a minute."

The author pinned this review to the top of the tooly.contact homepage. Seven more sit alongside it in English, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish, all saying roughly the same thing. Samson Oke, a Nigerian user (Aug 6): "This is the only extension that lets me export all my contacts for free. Unlike the others online that only give you 10 or 20." KJG, a Japanese user (Jul 25): "I tried a bunch of similar tools, and most got stuck at 10 to 30 entries. This one just worked as soon as I installed it. I wonder why it's still so unknown."

That last part is true.

What it is

WhatsApp itself can only export a single chat's history. It has no way to export contacts or group members. People who run businesses, manage communities, or switch phones have to copy numbers from a 300-person group one by one or install an extension. The whole category exists to fill a gap the official app doesn't address.

Tooly installs in Chrome. Once you open WhatsApp Web, you can select groups, contacts, or people you've chatted with and export them to a spreadsheet. It goes a step further than rivals: for each number, it works offline out who the country is, the time zone, the local time for that person right now, the likely language, the original carrier, and whether it's a mobile or landline. Those fields go into the export. The sample sheet on the site shows an Indonesian number, with "Telkomsel, local time 2:14 pm, good time to message" written next to it.

The paid tier is called Premium. It filters by country, account type (business or personal), and time, and generates import formats for Google Contacts and HubSpot / Zoho / Salesforce in one click, plus JSON export. Pricing is $3 per month, $12 per year, or $20 lifetime, all one-time payments with no auto-renewal.

The author, Joshua Galilea, lists an address in Cimahi, West Java, in the store, and his personal site describes him as a Web3 front-end engineer at a fintech company in Jakarta. The extension launched in Jul 6, was updated in Oct 14 to 1.3.2, and its store page has been translated into 52 languages.

Why it keeps users

The old problems with this category are already spelled out in user reviews: rivals offer only 10 to 30 free exports, or cap them per day, or charge a subscription just to export. Many extensions ask for permission to access "all websites". Lots of "export tools" are really bulk-messaging tools with an export bolted on, which makes users afraid of getting banned.

Tooly flips all of that: free unlimited export, with every detail column included for free; read-only, never sends any messages; requires only WhatsApp Web access (plus Google sign-in and its own domain); works without logging in. It also has a dedicated page, "Best WhatsApp Contact Export Tools Compared," that lists rivals' prices and permission scopes in a table. Every cell can be checked against the store pages, and it criticizes the "five-star unlock" model.

The result: all 13 reviews are 5 stars. 13 ratings from 596 users, about 2.2%, roughly in line with WA Contacts Extractor, a similar tool (60k users, 1,070 ratings, about 1.8%). The numbers show no sign of review manipulation.

Why it can't pull in users

The user curve is flat. Sep 1: 109 users. Oct 5: 309 users. Nov 6: 559 users. Nov 7: 596 users (from the third-party stats site extops.dev and the Chrome Web Store's daily figures). September averaged about 6 users a day, and October onward about 8 a day, with no spike on any day. That is typical of organic store search traffic.

In the store search, it only ranks on long-tail terms: in Nov 6, it was #7 for "whatsapp contacts vcard", #8 for "contact exporter whatsapp web", and #10 for "whatsapp number exporter". The terms with real volume, like "export whatsapp contacts" and "whatsapp contact exporter", don't show it in the top 10. Its Portuguese, Spanish, Indonesian, and Russian equivalents don't show it in the top 10 either. The store ranks mainly by installs and review count, so older products with tens of thousands of users hold the top spots, and a new 5-star small extension can't break in.

The author clearly knows this. From Oct 16 to 21, he built about 60 pages on the official site in one go: tutorial pages in 8 languages (English, Portuguese, Spanish, Indonesian, German, French, Turkish, Russian), a CSV-to-vCF tool, and the comparison table above. Two to three weeks later, searching "export whatsapp contacts to excel" on general search still doesn't show tooly.contact in the top 20 results, which belong to paid desktop software like iToolab and Wondershare. Daily new installs went from 6 to 8.

No content about it on YouTube, TikTok, X, or Reddit, and no paid acquisition found.

Where the money comes from

Barely any revenue yet. Premium only accepts crypto: USDC, USDT, ETH, BTC, SOL. The payment page gives you an address and QR code, and you transfer from your own wallet. Checking the public payment address on the Ethereum mainnet, up to Nov 6 there was only one 12 USDT payment (Oct 14, exactly the one-year price, so it's impossible to tell whether it was a real order or the author's own test), plus a phishing transfer faking USDT on the same day. Other chains were not checked (estimate: total revenue in the tens of dollars).

The core users of this category are small merchants in India, Indonesia, Brazil, and Nigeria, and most reviews come from there. Asking them to pay $3 with a crypto wallet is a much higher barrier than the price itself. This is probably Tooly's biggest weakness in monetization, and it shows the author is building this as a side project the way a Web3 engineer would.

Who it's competing with

Figures from the Chrome Web Store, Nov 7. Extensions with WhatsApp plus export, extract, or contact-saver in the name that are currently listed: 60.

This table shows two things. First, the demand is real, with several products at tens of thousands of users. Second, "free and unlimited" isn't unique to Tooly, since others claimed it earlier; doing this selling point better isn't enough to move it from #10 to #1. WASendly, the fastest grower in the same period, went the opposite way: stacked features, covered many languages, and added bulk messaging.

If it were you

In one line: don't build another WhatsApp contact exporter extension. The demand in this niche is real, but 60 identical products are crowded into the store, and rankings are locked by older products with tens of thousands of users. Tooly shows that a good product plus good word of mouth only brings in 8 new users a day. What's worth learning are its specific tactics, not this category.

Who it's for: indie developers who want to build small tools that the platform doesn't offer officially but many people need, and who are willing to get the details right. You can apply Tooly's approach to platforms that aren't crowded yet, like Telegram Web, LINE, Instagram DMs, Discord server members, or local chat and e-commerce backends in various countries. Search the store first, and only start when there are fewer than 10 similar products and the top one has under 10k users.

Who it's not for: anyone who wants to compete head-on on the WhatsApp export keyword. The top products' installs and review counts were built over several years, and a new extension climbing up from long-tail terms, at Tooly's pace, would take years.

How to build it: give the core action for free (unlimited exports), and charge a one-time fee only for things that a small number of heavy users need (filters, CRM formats). Add value to each row of data with information computed offline (country, time zone, carrier) so it costs no server money. Ask only for the one website permission you need, and state it clearly. For payments, use card-accepting providers like Stripe or Paddle, and if you target emerging markets, offer local payment methods instead of crypto only.

How to get users: on the first day of listing, write the store title as the phrase users actually search, and translate the listing into the main markets' languages. On the official site, make a comparison table against competitors listing only facts you can verify on the store page (price, permissions, usage limits). This table is both the page that persuades users and an entry point for search engines. For your first users, you need to go to where your target group gathers yourself (forums for community operators, comment sections of phone-migration tutorial videos); don't count on organic store traffic.

When to get in before others: there's no window in the WhatsApp export niche; it's already full. If you build on another platform, the window depends on when that platform adds its own export feature; the earlier the better.

Signs you got this wrong: the 60 multilingual pages Tooly put up in October start working over the next one or two months, with daily installs rising from 8 to dozens or hundreds, or it starts making noticeable revenue after switching to card payments. That would mean a newcomer who seriously works on SEO and word of mouth can still break into this niche, and this assessment is too pessimistic.