What Happened to the Honey Extension — and Is It Still Worth Using?

If you've been using Honey to automatically find coupon codes while shopping online, you may have noticed some changes — or stumbled across headlines raising serious questions about the extension's behavior. Here's a clear breakdown of what's happened, what it means, and what factors shape whether Honey still makes sense for any given shopper.

A Quick Recap: What Honey Was Built to Do

Honey is a browser extension developed to automatically search for and apply discount codes at checkout across thousands of online retailers. When you reach a payment page, Honey runs through its database of coupon codes and applies the best available deal — or so the pitch goes.

PayPal acquired Honey in 2020 for approximately $4 billion, making it one of the largest acquisitions of a browser extension-based company at the time. After the acquisition, Honey continued operating largely as it had before, integrated into PayPal's broader commerce ecosystem.

What Actually Happened: The Controversy Explained 🔍

In late 2024, a widely-shared video by YouTube creator MegaLag alleged that Honey was engaging in affiliate cookie stuffing — a practice that, if accurate, has significant implications for both consumers and content creators.

Here's how the alleged behavior works in plain terms:

• When you click an affiliate link from a YouTuber, blogger, or influencer, a tracking cookie is placed in your browser. This cookie records that the creator referred you to the retailer.
• If you complete a purchase, the creator earns a small commission.
• The allegation against Honey was that the extension was overwriting those affiliate cookies with its own, effectively claiming the referral commission for PayPal/Honey — even when Honey played no actual role in bringing you to that product.

For everyday shoppers, the concern went further: critics argued Honey wasn't always applying the best available coupon codes, and in some cases may have been suppressing better deals in favor of codes tied to retailer partnership agreements.

PayPal and Honey disputed several of these claims, but the video generated enough attention to trigger class action lawsuits and investigations into the extension's practices.

What Changed After the Controversy

Following the backlash, several things shifted:

• User trust dropped significantly, leading many people to uninstall the extension
• Content creators — especially in the tech and lifestyle space — began publicly cutting ties with Honey's affiliate program
• Browser extension store reviews became notably more polarized
• PayPal issued statements defending Honey's practices, though the legal proceedings were still ongoing as of early 2025

The extension itself remained available on Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Safari. It was not removed from browser stores. Functionally, Honey still operates — it still pops up at checkout and still attempts to apply codes.

The Variables That Matter for Your Situation

Whether any of this matters to you personally depends on a few factors worth thinking through:

What you were using Honey for If your primary goal was passive coupon-finding, the practical question is whether Honey's code library was delivering real savings — or whether you were getting retailer-curated codes that didn't outperform simply Googling "[store name] promo code."

Your privacy stance on browser extensions Browser extensions have broad permissions by design. Honey's permissions allow it to read data on all websites you visit — which is standard for this type of tool, but worth understanding. If you're privacy-conscious, this is a real consideration regardless of the controversy.

Whether you rely on creator affiliate links If you regularly support content creators by clicking their links before purchasing, the cookie-overwriting allegation is directly relevant to whether Honey was undermining those referrals without your awareness.

Your browser and shopping habits Heavy shoppers across many retailers get more theoretical value from a broad coupon database. Occasional shoppers on a handful of sites may find that a quick manual search for codes performs just as well — or better.

Alternative Tools in the Same Category

The controversy pushed many users to look at alternatives. A few categories worth knowing:

Each comes with its own trade-offs around privacy, coverage, and the type of savings it delivers.

The Bigger Pattern: What This Reveals About Browser Extensions 🧩

The Honey situation highlights something worth understanding about how browser extensions generate revenue. Most free extensions — not just Honey — are monetized through affiliate commissions, data licensing, or advertising partnerships. The extension is free to you; the business model runs in the background.

This isn't inherently malicious, but it does mean the extension's incentives aren't always perfectly aligned with yours. Understanding that structure helps you evaluate any tool that sits between your browser and your shopping cart.

Whether Honey's specific practices crossed ethical or legal lines is still being argued in court. What's clearer is that the controversy exposed real questions about transparency in how these tools operate — questions that apply broadly to the category, not just to Honey.

How those trade-offs land depends entirely on what you were getting from the extension, how you feel about the permissions model, and whether the savings you were seeing were actually the best available. Those are questions only your own shopping history can answer.