A small studio making small tools
ExtHive builds browser extensions we wanted and could not find: fast, narrow in scope, and honest about what they can see. Everything we ship is designed so that the interesting data — your pages, your prompts, your clipboard — never has to leave your machine.
Why we started
Browser extensions occupy an unusual position. They can read the page you are looking at, which is exactly what makes them useful and exactly what makes them dangerous. Most stores are full of tools that ask for far more access than their feature list justifies, and a depressing number of them have been quietly sold to companies whose business is data.
We started ExtHive because we kept installing something to solve a small problem, reading the permissions dialog, and uninstalling it again. The tools we wanted did not exist — not because they were hard to build, but because the version that harvests your browsing is easier to monetise.
So the constraint came first and the products came second: build extensions where the sensitive processing happens locally, then charge money for them, because a tool you pay for is a tool that does not need to sell you.
Charging money usually means accounts, because a licence has to belong to someone. Snapshot Studio has no licence at all — no sign-up, no key, no server it talks to. Whatever we add later will be treated as a cost to keep as small as possible rather than a foot in the door, and it will never carry the content the extension was built to look at.
Snapshot Studio came out of screenshotting long dashboards for reports. A small problem, worth solving properly.
Four constraints
These are the things we decided up front so that we would not have to relitigate them under commercial pressure later.
The data stays where it is
If a feature can run on your device, it runs on your device. A few genuinely cannot — syncing between machines, or applying a policy across a team — and those we build as opt-in, say so plainly, and still keep your content out of.
Small on purpose
We are not raising money and not chasing a suite. Each extension has to justify itself on its own, which keeps them narrow and fast.
Paid by users, not advertisers
Our revenue comes from people who buy a licence. That is the only business model where our incentives and yours point the same direction.
Support is a person
Email goes to the people who wrote the code. No ticket deflection, no chatbot in the way, no tier one reading from a script.
How the business works
We intend to sell licences. That is the whole model — there is no advertising, no data brokerage, no affiliate injection into pages you visit, and nothing funded by monetising the people using the free tools.
Snapshot Studio is free in full and stays that way. If a future extension carries a paid tier, what it sells will be capacity and convenience — never the thing the tool was built to do, and never by taking away something that was free when you installed it.
We are independent and intend to stay that way. If that ever changes, we will tell users before it happens, not after — and any acquirer would inherit the privacy commitments in our published policies.
Try something we built
Both shipped extensions are free to start with. If they are not useful, uninstalling takes two clicks and we will never email you about it.