The site blocker that stays out of your way.

The trouble with blockers

You installed it to get an hour back.

You install a site blocker because you want an hour of quiet work, or because you have opened the same news tab four times before your first real task. You expect it to hold the door shut. What arrives instead is more of the thing you were escaping.

BlockSite caps its free version at three sites, so the fourth domain you add is a billing prompt. Its reviews are dominated by billing complaints and in-app upgrade prompts. Other tools put an upgrade card on the block page itself, which means the screen you hit while trying to concentrate is an advertisement. Some ask for an account before they will save a list. Some start a subscription that keeps charging long after you stopped opening the extension. And when Chrome disabled Manifest V2 in Chrome 138 in mid-2025, a number of legacy blockers stopped working.

A block page has one job at the moment you land on it, and selling is not it. It should confirm the page is closed, give you a beat to remember why you closed it, and put you back where you meant to be. That is the whole design brief.

Quietsite is built to that brief. It runs in Chrome and Microsoft Edge, on Manifest V3 from the first line. No ads. No upgrade card on the block page. No rating prompt, no account wall, no subscription. Version 2.5.1 is built. Live on the Microsoft Edge Add-ons Store; the Chrome Web Store listing is submitted and in review.

How it works

The browser does the blocking. Quietsite just keeps the list.

The question worth asking of any blocker is where the rules are evaluated, because that decides what the extension can see. Quietsite hands that job to the browser and keeps none of it.

A background service worker keeps your list in sync with Chrome's own declarativeNetRequest engine. Add a domain and Quietsite writes one redirect rule into the browser's rule table. The rule matches top-level navigations only, and subdomains are covered automatically. Chrome and Edge evaluate those rules natively, before page content starts loading. Quietsite does not watch your traffic, read page content, or look at URLs while you browse, because it never sees them.

Your list, your settings, and your insights live in chrome.storage.sync, which is the browser's own storage. Turn browser sync on and they follow your profile across your devices on the same browser, through the account you already use; this is free and automatic. Leave it off and they stay on the machine. Syncing across different browsers (Chrome to Edge) is a separate, Pro-gated pairing feature, since it needs a bridge Chrome's own sync does not provide.

Hit a blocked site and the browser sends you to a local page inside the extension. The icon of the site you blocked comes from Chrome's own favicon cache on your disk, so even that costs no request.

All of which means there is no Quietsite server in the blocking path itself. No account database and no rules service, so normal blocking makes no outbound requests at all, and that is a property of the architecture rather than a promise anyone has to keep. Anonymous usage statistics are sent separately, carry feature names only, and can be switched off. (The design gallery and the marketing site you are reading now do use our own servers; see below.)

The block page

The screen you land on is a canvas, not a wall.

Of the four blockers compared below, none lets you decide what is on the block screen. Freedom shows a green banner saying you are free. Cold Turkey shows a gray popup. Quietsite treats it as the one screen you will see on your worst afternoon, and lets you decide what is on it.

It works out of the box with no configuration at all: a finished scene is active from the moment you install, and a person who never opens the studio is fully served. The block page itself carries no gears and no controls. A single low-opacity Customize appears when you hover, and nowhere else.

Open the studio and you start at a gallery of finished scenes rather than a settings form. Pick one and it applies live. Inside a scene, the content is made of blocks you add, reorder, and remove, each with its settings sitting next to it instead of buried in a modal. The shipped block types include a breathing guide, a clock, a countdown, your own written goals, your own reason for the block, a resisted-today counter, statistics, a two-minute timer, a private journal prompt, an intentional-browse launcher, a book passage, and free text.

Escalating friction, the avoidance journal, and a passage from your own reading list are three block types that none of the four compared blockers ship. Escalating friction makes the door harder the more you push on it: the first block of the day is a short delay, the third adds a prompt for your reason, the fifth asks you to breathe and write a line first, and the whole thing resets at midnight. The avoidance journal asks what you are avoiding and keeps a private local log, because distraction is usually avoidance wearing a different hat, and naming it tends to break the loop. A passage from your own reading list turns a block on X into a nudge toward a book you already chose.

Backgrounds are yours: a calm theme, one of six bundled backdrops, or your own photo with the blur, dimming, text color, and alignment set live as you watch. Your photo is read on your machine and stays there. With the Pro unlock, each blocked site can have its own page, so the reason you blocked one thing is not the reason you see when you hit another.

Six moments

Where a blocker actually earns its place.

What reaches the network

By default, nothing. Then three things you turn on.

Out of the box the content-source setting is empty, and empty means zero requests. The blocking never phones home: there is no license to check and no domain list to report, because neither exists on our side.

Three things can reach out, and each one is something you switch on yourself.

Art and writing on the block page. Turn this on in the studio and the block page can draw public-domain art and poetry from six named sources: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, Wikimedia, Openverse, PoetryDB, and On This Day. Leave it off, which is how it ships, and no media request is made.

The design gallery. Share a block-page design and it is stored under a six-character code you can send to someone. What travels is the design: the background, the layout, the words you wrote on it. Your block list, your paths, your keywords, and anything about you stay where they are.

The one-time Pro unlock. Handled by the payment provider, and only at the moment you choose to buy.

Outside those three, everything runs on local storage. Settings sync free through your own browser sync, if you have it on, using the account you already signed into. There is no account database; the one hosted store is the design gallery above, and it holds only what you explicitly choose to share. Usage statistics are anonymous, cover features rather than addresses, and are optional.

The limits

What it does not do, and who should buy something else.

Quietsite stays small on purpose, and small means real gaps. Two are worth stating before you install it.

There is no adult-content category blocking. Filtering a category rather than a domain needs a maintained list of what belongs in that category, and a lookup against it, which is a different mechanism and a different privacy story from the one described above. There is also no mobile app. Quietsite runs on Chrome and Microsoft Edge, with both store listings staged, and a browser extension cannot reach a phone.

So there are people this is the wrong tool for, and they are easy to name. If you need the block to follow you onto a phone, Freedom covers Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android from $3.33 a month or $99.50 once, and that cross-device reach is a real advantage a browser extension cannot match. If you want a desktop lock that closing the browser cannot get around, Cold Turkey is $39 once on Mac and Windows and does not offer a mobile app. If open source matters more to you than anything else here, LeechBlock NG is free, open source, and rates 4.9 stars on the Chrome Web Store.

What is left is the person we built it for: someone who works in Chrome or Edge, wants unlimited blocking without a cap, wants the block page to be quiet, and does not want a subscription for any of it.