Free Forever, Ad-Free, No Telemetry: How Highlighty Actually Makes Money

There's an old line about free software: "if you're not paying, you're the product." It's a healthy instinct. A free tool that can read every page you open has to pay its bills somehow, and if the answer is advertising or data, that bill gets paid with your attention or your privacy.

Highlighty is free and ad-free, with no tracking. So it's fair to ask how it stays afloat. This post gives you the plain answer: an optional PRO upgrade, and nothing else.

TL;DR

• Highlighty is free and ad-free. There are no ads, no analytics SDK, and no user tracking of any kind.
• The business is one thing: an optional PRO upgrade that unlocks power features. That's it.
• The free version needs no account and talks to no server to do its job. If you never go PRO, you never sign in and nothing is sent.
• PRO signs in with a Highlighty account. Our servers store only your login details and subscription status — never your queries, lists, history, or the pages you read.
• We don't sell or share your data. There's no data business to sell from, because we don't collect the raw material.
• No remotely injected code: the code reviewed in the store is the code that runs on your machine.

Free means free, not "free for now"

The core of Highlighty — multi-keyword highlighting with its own color per term, the Cmd+F search bar, PDF search, on-device OCR, the X-Ray context minimap, scrollbar markers, whitelists and blacklists — is free. You don't make an account to use any of it.

Because the free version needs no account, there's no sign-in step and no server call to do the actual work. The highlighting and searching happen in your browser, on your machine. That's not a trial that quietly expires; it's the product.

Ad-free, and why that matters

An advertising business has a built-in incentive to learn more about you than the product needs — what sites you open, what you search, who you are. Once that incentive exists, it tends to win.

Highlighty has no advertising layer at all. There are no ads in the extension, and nothing watching your browsing to target them. There's no analytics SDK building a profile of you, because we don't collect what it would take to build one.

So how does it make money? PRO.

The whole business is an optional PRO upgrade. PRO unlocks features aimed at people who lean on Highlighty all day:

• Fuzzy, typo-tolerant search — find the word even when you spelled it wrong.
• Regex pattern search — match dates, emails, order numbers, or several terms at once.
• Cross-tab find — search every open tab at once and jump to the matches.
• Backup & restore — export your queries and settings to move between computers.
• Grow found query size — bump matched text to a larger fixed size so it stands out.
• Unlimited bulk import — import keyword lists from a spreadsheet with no size limit (the free version has an upload size limit).

If none of that is something you need, PRO costs you nothing — not money, and not a sign-in. The free version doesn't nag you into an account or hold core features hostage. PRO is there for the people whose work justifies it.

What our servers actually hold

Being honest means not claiming "nothing ever leaves your device," because that isn't quite true once you go PRO. Here's the exact boundary.

PRO signs in with a Highlighty account. For that to work, our servers hold your login details and your subscription state — whether your account is on a paid plan or a trial. That's the entire list.

We do not receive your queries, your saved keyword lists, your search history, or the contents of the pages you visit. Those live in your browser's local storage, on your device. Cross-tab find, for example, sends your query from one of your tabs to your other tabs through the browser's own internal messaging — it never routes through us.

And we don't sell or share your data. There's nothing to sell: an account record that's just a login and a subscription flag isn't a profile of you, and it's the only thing we keep.

Why we're telling you this plainly

An extension that can't tell you how it makes money is one whose incentives you can't see. We'd rather just say it: Highlighty is free because the free tier is genuinely free, and it's sustainable because some people choose to pay for PRO. No ads, no tracking, no data sale, no surprise.

Frequently asked questions

Is Highlighty really free?

Yes. The core — multi-keyword highlighting, the Cmd+F search bar, PDF search, on-device OCR, X-Ray, scrollbar markers, and whitelists and blacklists — is free and needs no account. It's not a trial that expires.

If it's free, how does Highlighty make money?

Through an optional PRO upgrade, and nothing else. PRO unlocks features like fuzzy search, regex, cross-tab find, backup & restore, grow found query size, and unlimited bulk import. There are no ads and no data business.

Does Highlighty show ads or track me?

No. Highlighty is ad-free and runs no user tracking of any kind. There's no advertising layer and no analytics tied to what you search or the sites you visit.

What's the difference between free and PRO?

Free covers multi-keyword saved lists with per-term colors, the basic Cmd+F bar, PDF search, OCR, X-Ray, scrollbar markers, whitelist and blacklist, and case, diacritic, and whole-phrase options. PRO adds fuzzy typo-tolerant search, regex, cross-tab find, backup & restore, grow found query size, and unlimited bulk import.

Do I have to make an account to use Highlighty?

No. The free version needs no account and talks to no server to do its job. You only sign in if you choose to use PRO features.

If I go PRO, what does Highlighty store about me?

Only your login details and your subscription state. Our servers never receive your queries, saved lists, search history, or the contents of the pages you read — those stay in your browser's local storage on your device. We don't sell or share your data.