Packs
Better Sidebar's organizing tools are free and stay free. Two optional one-time purchases add extras and fund the work.
Settings → Packs
What You Get
Free
Everything that makes the extension worth installing:
- Folders, tags, colors, pinning, drag-and-drop, batch operations
- Full-text search with chained filters
- Prompt library, variables, composition, slash commands
- Snippets, conversation outline, smart scrollbar, selection toolbar
- Gems, Notebooks, multi-account profiles
- Export to Markdown, plain text and JSON
- Google Drive backup and local backups with rollback
- The agent, read-only — query, analyze, report
No account, no sign-up, no nag screens.
Support Pack — $5
Themes, and a way to say thanks.
- All 19 premium theme presets, unlocked permanently
- Future themes at no extra cost
- Import AI-generated custom themes
- Unlimited custom theme slots
See Themes.
Power Pack — $19.99
Everything in Support Pack, plus the agent stops being read-only.
- Agent writes — create folders, move conversations, batch-tag, rename, merge, clean up
- Unlimited workspaces and files (free is 1 workspace, 5 files)
- Export to Obsidian and Notion, single items and batches
See Agent Overview and Workspace Agent.
The honest way to decide: the free agent will tell you exactly what it would do to your library. Run it, read the plan, and see whether you'd want it carried out. If the answer is obviously yes, the Power Pack is the button that does it. If the plan doesn't look useful, don't buy it.
Buying
Both are one-time purchases. There's no subscription.
7-day no-questions-asked refund. Email within 7 days for a full refund. No forms, no justification needed.
Activating
Paste your token into Settings → Packs and click Activate.
Accepted formats:
Activation Slots
One licence covers 10 activations, across browser profiles and computers.
An activation is consumed per browser profile. Worth understanding what that means in practice:
That last row is the one people get wrong. Better Sidebar's own multi-account profiles are free — they share the browser profile's activation. It's separate browser profiles that cost slots.
Ten is generous for normal use. You'd have to be deliberately spreading across machines to run out.
Releasing a slot
Changing computers, or reinstalling your browser? Open Settings → Packs on the profile you're leaving and choose Release this activation.
That turns premium features off there and frees the slot. You can re-activate on that profile later with the same token.
If you see "All 10 activation slots are in use", open settings on a profile you no longer use and release it.
Release the slot before you wipe a browser profile or retire a machine. Releasing needs to run on the profile that holds it. If you've already lost access, contact support and it can be sorted out — but it's a round trip you can avoid with ten seconds of housekeeping.
Licence Checks
The extension re-validates the licence with the licence server periodically.
If the server can't be reached
You get a notice, and your licence stays active. Retries continue in the background, and the notice tells you how long it stays valid regardless. Nothing breaks because your network had a bad day.
Common cause: a VPN or proxy blocking the request. Check that first if it persists.
If the licence is genuinely rejected
Three possible reasons, and the extension says which:
If you think any of these is wrong, contact support. It's a small independent project — a real person reads the email.
Trying Before Buying
Themes — click any premium theme for a genuine 5-minute preview on your actual page. Unlimited previews. See Themes.
Agent — the read-only half is free and permanent. It'll tell you precisely what it would do to your library.
Workspace — 1 workspace, 5 files. Enough to run a real document review or build a small project and find out whether the feature suits how you work.
None of these are crippled demos. They're the actual features, bounded.
Open Source
Better Sidebar is open source under GPL-3.0. The source is on GitHub.
The paid packs fund continued maintenance by a solo developer. The core organizing tools will stay free.