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 does mean some of our extensions have accounts — a licence has to belong to someone, and features like syncing your settings between machines or applying one policy across a team cannot be done on a single device. We treat that as a cost to keep as small as possible, not a foot in the door: the free tiers ask for nothing, the sync is opt-in, and none of it carries the content the extension was built to look at.
Snapshot came out of screenshotting long dashboards for reports. Prompt Guard came out of watching a colleague paste a production config file into a chat window at the end of a long day. Both are small problems. Both were 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 sell licences. That is the whole model. There is no advertising, no data brokerage, no affiliate injection into pages you visit, and no free tier funded by monetising the people on it.
Snapshot is free because a genuinely good free tool is the most honest introduction we can offer. Prompt Guard has a free tier that covers individuals and a paid tier for people whose work makes a leak expensive. If the free tier is enough for you, use it — that is not a loss to us, it is the point.
Purchases are handled by Paddle.com Market Ltd. as Merchant of Record, which means they process the payment, issue the invoice and handle tax. Details are in Subscriptions & Billing.
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.