Bookmark Bastion is here (the Chrome Web Store is not invited)

Drumroll, please. Or don’t, I’ll be fine. Bookmark Bastion is out.

It’s a bookmark manager for Chromium browsers built around workspaces and folders, with notes, tags and search. Your saved logins are encrypted with a passphrase only you know, individual notes can be locked on demand, and you can bring your existing browser bookmarks along with you. It works in Chrome, Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, Opera and friends.

And, in keeping with the rest of this site: no account, no server, no tracking. Your library stays on your computer. Revolutionary, I know. Somehow this is now a feature and not the bare minimum.

“Great, where do I click Add to Chrome?”

Nowhere. It’s not in the Chrome Web Store, at least not yet, and that’s a decision I made on purpose.

I did look into it. I really did. And then I had second thoughts, several of them, in a row:

Google wants sensitive personal information from me. To publish an extension, apparently, I get to hand over details about myself that I’d rather keep to myself.
And a credit card. Yes, for a marketplace I wouldn’t even be selling through. I’m not offering Bookmark Bastion for sale through Google, so I’d be paying and identifying myself for the honour of giving something away. Truly a business model for the ages.
And the format of my code. There’s a very specific, open format my code would have to be in, and I’m not thrilled about reshaping my work to suit a store’s checklist.

Now picture the irony. I built a tool whose entire pitch is “your data stays yours”, and step one of publishing it would be to hand my own data over to a giant whose business model is, let’s say, other people’s data. I’ll pass for now, thanks. Nothing personal. Well, technically everything personal, which is the problem.

So how do I get it?

The old-fashioned way, and it takes about a minute:

Grab the zip from the latest release on GitHub. There’s a SHA256SUMS.txt next to it, so you can check the download is what it claims to be. That’s a nice touch that a store can’t promise you.
Unzip it into a folder you won’t delete by accident.
Open chrome://extensions (or your browser’s equivalent) and turn on Developer mode.
Click Load unpacked and pick the folder.
Pin it, run the first-time import of your bookmarks, and enjoy.

The full steps, including how to update, are on the product page. No store means no silent background updates either. When you want the newest version, you press “Check for updates”, and that’s the only time the extension talks to GitHub. You stay in charge, which is the whole idea.

Free to use, Pro if you want it

The core is free: workspaces, folders, notes, tags, search, import, export, notes encrypted on demand and a handful of saved logins. No trial, no countdown timer, no “your free period has ended” guilt trip.

If you want more, there’s a Pro version. It adds unlimited saved logins, library-wide encryption, custom smartspaces, automatic backups and a few other extras. It comes in two flavours:

1 year for $5
Lifetime for just $10

That’s it. No subscription, no auto-renewing, no “pricing tiers” page that needs a flowchart to read. You pay once through Ko-fi, you get a key, and a key is checked locally, with no account and no internet connection. And if you never buy one, nothing you’ve already saved gets hidden or deleted.

I’m not looking to make a killing here. Pro simply helps me cover the server costs, so the free side stays free. If you’d rather not, no hard feelings. The product page lists exactly what Pro adds.

Will it ever show up in the store?

Maybe. It says “yet” for a reason. If that changes, I’ll tell you right here, and it will have been on my terms. Until then, the extension is out in the open, a download away, and nobody had to hand over a credit card to make that happen.

Go forth and bookmark responsibly.