Stash for Chrome
Everything worth reading, in one beautiful place.
Save any article with one click from your browser, then read it later: clean, offline, and free of clutter. Articles, newsletters, and PDFs, all in one beautiful library. No account, no subscription, nothing readable of yours on any server.
No account, no subscription. Read on your Mac and the web today.
A closer look
Your reading list, and a place to actually read it.
One library for everything you saved. One reading surface built for comfort: a serif measure at a sensible width, a subtle progress bar, text sized to your eyes.
What it does
Built to be read, not managed.
One unified library
Articles, newsletters, EPUBs, and PDFs sit together in one list. Type badges, a source, an estimated read time, and a dot for what you haven't read yet.
A distraction-free reader
Saved pages are stripped to the words: a serif body at a comfortable measure, generous spacing, and nothing in the margins fighting for your attention.
Private, and yours
Your reading lives in your browser, not in an account. Pair a second device and your articles and highlights travel sealed, end-to-end encrypted, unreadable in transit even to us.
Pick up where you left off
A subtle progress bar tracks how far you've read. Mark an item read with one tap, and your place is kept on every device.
Sized to your eyes
Step the text up or down to a size that's actually comfortable. Light and dark follow your system, so reading at night stays easy.
Highlight what matters
Tap a paragraph to highlight the line worth keeping. Your highlights stay with the piece, saved right alongside your library.
Save from anywhere
Click the Stash button on any page, or press the keyboard shortcut, and the clean article is saved. Drop in PDFs too. It's on your shelf in seconds.
Filter by type
Just want the long reads, the newsletters, or the books? One tap filters your shelf, so the right thing for this moment is close at hand.
Private by default
No account, no tracking, no analytics. What you read is your business. Stash keeps it that way because it never sees it in the first place.
The whole vision
A reading workspace that stays yours.
Beyond the reader itself: what your $9.99 already buys today, and what it unlocks next. Eight capabilities, never mixed up on this page.
Own it, not rent it
$9.99, once. No account and no renewal, plus a one-click export any time so your library is a file you own, not a subscription you keep paying for.
Live now. The screen above is the real checkout at /stash/buy/, not a mockup.
Bring your old library in with one drop
Drop in your Pocket, Instapaper, or Omnivore export and your whole library, tags included, lands on your shelf.
Live now for all three importers: Pocket, Instapaper, and Omnivore.
Conduit: bring your own sources
Really Simple Syndication (RSS), newsletters, and a personal forwarding inbox land in the same unified queue. No second subscription: one purchase unlocks both apps.
Planned
Beyond Apple and Chrome
Leave Apple or Chrome behind and your library still follows you, to Android and Windows too.
Planned
Never re-fight a dead link or a paywall
Every save writes a permanent local copy the moment you save it, so a page going down, or paywalling later, never costs you the piece.
Live now: local-first storage, with an offline reader and offline images included.
Listen, or send it to your Kindle
Listen to any article with one tap, or send it straight to your Kindle. No extra app, no extra subscription.
Live now, in the reader and the extension.
Ask it to save you time
Ask for the three-sentence version before committing to the long read, and see what's piling up unread at a glance.
Summarize is live in the web app and built into the Chrome extension. The unread digest is live in the web app.
Try it before you own it
A free starting tier that unlocks the full $9.99 lifetime version whenever you're ready.
Planned
The $9.99 lifetime unlock is not changing.
Save and sync, the $9.99 checkout, the reader, migration from Pocket, Instapaper, and Omnivore, text-to-speech, Send to Kindle, and article summaries are all yours the moment you buy. Conduit, Android and Windows, and a free starting tier are next off the bench.
Why Stash
Yours to keep.
Pocket and Omnivore, two of the best-loved reading apps, shut down in the last two years (Omnivore in November 2024, Pocket in July 2025), and their users learned the hard way what it means to keep a library on someone else's servers. Stash is built the other way around. You pay once, the app is yours, and the things you save live on your own device. If we ever stepped away, your shelf would still be right where you left it.
- Pay once, own it. A single purchase, no monthly bill, no renewal you forgot about.
- No account, ever. No email, no password, no profile. You just open it and read.
- Your library stays with you. Saved pages and highlights sync end-to-end encrypted, with a key that never leaves your devices. Still no account.
- It won't vanish on you. Because your library is yours to keep and export, it outlasts any one app.
- Focused on purpose. No feed, no streaks, no badges nagging you. Just the next good read.
How it works
Save it, and it is yours.
Save it
Press the Stash button in the Chrome toolbar and the page you are reading is on your shelf. Command+Shift+S on a Mac, or Alt+Shift+S everywhere else, does the same without your hands leaving the keyboard. Right-click and you get two more: save the whole page, or select a few paragraphs first and save only the excerpt. PDFs and EPUB files come straight off your own device.
Find it
Everything lands on one shelf: articles, excerpts, newsletters, EPUBs, and PDFs together, each with its type, its source, and an estimated read time. Search across everything you have saved, or filter down to one kind when you know what this hour is for.
Read it
Saved pages open stripped to the words, in a serif body at a comfortable measure with nothing in the margins. Step the size up or down to suit your eyes. Highlight the line worth keeping and it stays attached to the piece. A progress bar remembers how far you got.
Keep it
Every save writes a permanent copy to your own machine at the moment you save it. The publisher can pull the page down or put it behind a login next year and your copy is untouched. One click exports the library to a file you keep. It costs $9.99 once, and there is nothing to renew.
What it is allowed to see
It cannot watch you browse.
Stash cannot see the sites you visit, read your open tabs, or keep a record of where you go. That is not a promise about our intentions. It is a description of what Chrome granted the extension, and Chrome will not grant more than the extension asked for.
The relevant permission is called activeTab. In plain terms: the extension may read one page, in one tab, at the moment you ask it to save that page, and not a second before or after. Every other moment of your browsing is invisible to it, because the ability to see it was never requested.
You do not have to take our word for any of this. Chrome lists an extension's permissions before you install it, and the Chrome Web Store shows the same list on the listing page. Stash asks for storage, unlimited storage, activeTab, scripting, context menus, notifications, and alarms, and it requests access to exactly one address on the internet: the sync relay at stash-sync.belstone.workers.dev. There is no permission over any website on that list, which is the part worth checking.
A second device
Your shelf travels sealed.
Pair once by scanning a QR code, and your library follows you between Chrome and the web reader. There is still no account, no email, and no profile sitting on a server with your name on it.
Article bodies and highlights are encrypted with the Advanced Encryption Standard in Galois/Counter Mode (AES-GCM) before they leave your device. The key that opens them is called the bodyKey, and it never goes to the server. The relay is a Cloudflare Worker; the encrypted bodies sit in object storage as ciphertext, keyed by library and item, and stay opaque to it. What the relay carries, it cannot read. A single stored body is capped at 30 MB.
An automated test suite, 16 passing assertions run against the live sync relay, covers encryption, delta sync, cross-device conflict resolution, tombstone deletion with storage cleanup, and keeping one library isolated from another. It exists so this section is a claim someone checked rather than one we wrote.
Having no account has a cost, and here it is: pairing is a real step you have to take, and a device you never paired holds nothing.
Bringing your library
Coming from Pocket, Instapaper, or Omnivore.
Three importers ship today. Export from the old app, drop the file into Stash, and your shelf is there. Pocket takes its .html or .csv export, Instapaper takes its .csv or .html export, and Omnivore has its own. Tags come across with the items, so the shape you gave your library survives the move.
This exists because Pocket and Omnivore, two of the best-loved reading apps, closed in the last two years, and the people who had trusted them with years of saved reading spent a weekend getting it back. The same door works outward: one click exports everything, whenever you want, into a file that is yours. Leaving is meant to be as easy as arriving.
The honest math
Read for years, not by the month.
Most read-it-later apps now charge every month, and your library lives or dies with the subscription. Stash asks for one payment and then gets out of the way.
- ×An account and password to manage
- ×Your library sits on their servers
- ×Stop paying, lose access
- ×If they shut down, it goes with them
- ✓No account, nothing to sign in to
- ✓Your library stays on your device
- ✓Buy it once, read for as long as you like
- ✓Articles, newsletters, EPUBs, and PDFs in one place
| Feature | Stash | GoodLinks | Instapaper | Matter | Readwise Reader |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pay once, no subscription | $9.99 once | $9.99, + optional $4.99/yr | No | No | No, $9.99–$12.99/mo |
| Works beyond Apple (Chrome + web) | ✓ | - | ✓ | - | ✓ |
| Highlights included, nothing gated | ✓ | ✓ | Premium | Premium | - |
| No account required | ✓ | ✓ | - | - | No |
| Import your Pocket library | ✓ | Via Shortcuts | ✓ | - | - |
| Listen with text-to-speech | ✓ | - | Premium | Premium | ✓ |
| Send to Kindle | ✓ | - | ✓ | ✓ | - |
| Competitor marks and prices are from our July 2026 scan of public product pages, reviews, and forums. A dash means not offered, not stated, or not found in that scan. Every cell describes what each product does today, read from its own pages, so anyone can repeat the scan. | |||||
“$60 a year is absurd... I used to pay for Instapaper, then it was sold and went free, now it's back to a pay service.”
“It's so rare these days to find actual value that we can OWN and this app provides it all.”
“My feed became locked down without purchasing a premium subscription with no warning... what was free now costs money.”
Real posts from public reviews and forums about other reading apps, linked to their sources. They are not testimonials about Stash.
Questions
Good to know.
What happens to my library if Stash goes away?
It stays with you. Everything you save lives on your own device, so your articles, EPUBs, and PDFs are yours whether or not the app is still around. You are never renting access to your own reading.
Is it really a one-time purchase?
Yes. One payment of $9.99 and Stash is yours. There is no subscription and no monthly fee, and one purchase covers Stash everywhere it runs.
Do I need to create an account?
No. There is no sign-up, no email, and no password. Stash saves everything locally on your device, so there's nothing to sign into and it works the moment you open it.
Does my reading sync across devices?
Yes, between Chrome and the web reader today: pair once with a QR code and your library follows you, end-to-end encrypted, still with no account. Your articles and highlights are sealed with a key that never leaves your devices, so the relay that carries them cannot read them. iPhone joins when the app ships.
Does it read EPUBs and PDFs as well as articles?
Yes. Web articles and newsletters are saved and cleaned for reading, and EPUB and PDF files can be added straight from your device. They all sit on one shelf and open in the same beautiful reader.
Which devices does it run on?
The Mac app and the web reader today, with the Chrome listing in submission. Everything works offline, and there's no account to set up.
Is my reading private?
Yes. No analytics, no trackers, no account. By default everything stays on your device; if you pair devices, your articles and highlights are end-to-end encrypted before they leave, so the relay that syncs them can never read them. One honest footnote, because this page is not the app: this marketing page counts anonymous page views and which sections are reached, on our own server, with no cookie and nothing stored on your device. The app you install carries none of it.
Get Stash
Pay once, and Stash is yours to keep.
$9.99 once. No subscription. No account. No disappearing act.
Read on your Mac and the web today. One purchase unlocks Stash everywhere, with no monthly bill, ever.