Grab This Bookmark-Organising Extension Before It Costs Money

Chrome: One of our favourite Chrome extensions, Sprucemarks, is switching to a subscription model—its creator, Kai Nightmode, announced the news this weekend. There’s a silver lining, however: It’ll only cost $10 to score lifetime access to future iterations of Sprucemarks, which is an incredibly powerful tool for automatically sorting your browser’s messy bookmarks. Best of all, you can use a free version of Sprucemarks forever if you act now.

Why is Sprucemarks so great?

You can support Sprucemarks by signing up for its Patreon, with a minimum donation of $1/month. Once you hit $10 in total donations, you unlock access to all future versions of Sprucemarks. It’s worth a Starbucks coffee, I’d say, because this extension is a great way to reduce your browser’s clutter. Enable Sprucemarks, and you can set it to automatically sort your entire bookmarks bar (or the folders within) by name or URL, or even by the date you bookmarked the website.

And that’s it. That’s not a ton of functionality, but you get plenty of options for what you want Sprucemarks to sort. If you only care about sorting sub-folders of your Bookmarks Bar’s primary folders, for example, you can set Sprucemarks to only work its magic there. Similarly, you can only have Sprucemarks sort your Bookmarks Bar, if you’d rather manage the contents of its folders yourself. (I wouldn’t trust myself to do that, but I have way too many bookmarks.)

How to use Sprucemarks for free (forever)

I appreciate the fact that Nightmode, Sprucemarks’ creator, isn’t forcing the subscription element on anyone who can’t or doesn’t want to pay. You can use the free version of Sprucemarks as long as you want. You’ll have to download the current version from GitHub, save it to your computer somewhere, enable Developer Mode in your Chrome browser (via chrome://extensions/), and load the extension manually.

Hold on to that .ZIP archive of Sprucemarks, too, because you’ll need to repeat this process for any new systems (or new reinstallations) where you want to use the extension. It’s a slightly cumbersome process, but if that’s what you need to do to save $US7 ($10), that’s on you. I’d rather just purchase the Patreon.