Chemical graphs are simple undirected connected graphs, where vertices represent atoms in a molecule and edges represent chemical bonds. A degree-based topological index is a molecular descriptor used to study specific physicochemical properties of molecules. Such an index is computed from the sum of the weights of the edges of a chemical graph, each edge having a weight defined by a formula that depends only on the degrees of its endpoints. Given any degree-based topological index and given two integers $n$ and $m$, we are interested in determining chemical graphs of order $n$ and size $m$ that maximize or minimize the index. Focusing on chemical graphs with maximum degree at most 3, we show that this reduces to determining the extreme points of a polytope that contains at most 10 facets. We also show that the number of extreme points is at most 16, which means that for any given $n$ and $m$ there are very few different classes of extremal graphs, independently of the chosen degree-based topological index.