Is it worth publishing a VS Code extension?

Q: Is it worth publishing a VS Code extension?

On the numbers, the median extension in this August 2026 sample has 804 installs and at least 54.4% have fewer than 1,000. The top 1% hold 87.4% of all installs. Installs are not revenue — the Marketplace has no paid tier — so this measures reach, not income.

54.4% of measured extensions have under 1,000 installs and 22.5% have under 100 — both floors. The median is 804. What that does and does not imply.

Read this before quoting anythingThis is not a census and it is head-biased: each category was paged from the most-installed downwards until a cap, so the tail below the cap is missing. Every “under N installs” figure here is therefore a floor, not an estimate — the true share is higher, because everything the crawl did not reach lies below everything it did.

The honest answer is that the median outcome is small and the distribution is brutal: 54.4% of extensions in this sample have fewer than a thousand installs, 22.5% have fewer than a hundred, and both figures are floors. The median publisher with exactly one extension has 606 installs on it.

What you are competing against, in numbers

The top 1% of extensions hold 87.4% of all installs; the top 10% hold 98.0%. Attention here is not merely unequal, it is nearly all spoken for.
The median extension has 804 installs. The 25th percentile has 133.
Of extensions first released in 2026, 73.3% are under a hundred installs at the time of measurement.
86.1% of publishers stopped at one.

What the numbers do not say

They do not say don’t. Installs are not revenue — the Marketplace has no paid tier, so nothing here measures money at all, and a 300-install extension that gets you known in a niche may be worth more than a 30,000-install one that does not. A tool you wrote for yourself and published costs nothing extra to publish.

What they do say is that “build it and they will come” is not supported by the distribution, and that any plan whose first step is organic marketplace discovery should be checked against a median of 804 and a 25th percentile of 133.

The one lever that shows up in the data

Publishers with more extensions have a much higher median best extension — and the causation almost certainly runs both ways, because people whose first one worked keep going. The gradient, and the reason not to over-read it.

All of it, free. One JSONL row per extension, the same data as CSV, the machine-readable summary, the crawler that produced them and the list of rows withheld because their publisher id has the shape of a credential. CC BY 4.0, DOI-archived, no signup and no email. extensions.jsonl extensions.csv the repository

The rest of this dataset

Do star ratings predict how many people install an extension?They point the wrong way. Five-star extensions have a lower median install count than three-star ones, and the reason matters.
How many installs does a new VS Code extension actually get?By release-year cohort, with the age confound stated rather than hidden.
The most-installed VS Code extensionsThe top 250 in this sample, with publisher, category and last-updated date.
How many VS Code extensions and publishers are there?What this crawl found, what it could not reach, and why the difference matters.
How much of the VS Code Marketplace is abandoned?Share not updated in twelve months, by category — and why the stale ones are the bigger ones.
Does publishing more extensions help?Median best-extension installs by how many a publisher has shipped.
VS Code Marketplace statistics, measuredEvery headline figure in one place, each one recomputable from the published data.