SnapLocal launches on Product Hunt today

Today — September 23, 2026 — SnapLocal goes live on Product Hunt. If you've been following this blog, you already know the premise: a Chrome extension for screenshots and annotations where nothing ever leaves your machine. No cloud upload, no telemetry pixel, no account required. If this is your first time here, welcome — let's walk through why we built this thing and how it works under the hood.

Why another screenshot tool?

The Chrome Web Store already has dozens of capture extensions, and several of them are excellent at what they do. The problem isn't capability — it's architecture. Popular tools like Lightshot upload every capture to a public server URL by default. Nimbus routes your screenshots through cloud infrastructure for sharing. GoFullPage gates basic export behind a paid tier. None of these are malicious; they're simply built around a cloud-first model where the convenience of instant sharing comes at the cost of default privacy.

We think that trade-off should be opt-in, not baked into the architecture. So SnapLocal takes the opposite approach: there is no upload code path. Not one that's disabled by default — none exists at all. You can verify this yourself by reading the extension's manifest: zero host_permissions, zero network requests, zero external dependencies at runtime.

Zero-upload architecture

Here's what that means technically:

No host permissions. The manifest declares no host_permissions array. Chrome simply cannot make network requests on behalf of this extension because it was never granted the capability. This isn't a promise — it's a platform-level constraint enforced by the browser itself.

chrome.storage.local. Every capture, every annotation layer, every piece of history lives in Chrome's local storage API on your device. It never syncs to Google's servers (that would require chrome.storage.sync, which we don't use). Clear your extension data and it's gone — no orphan copies on someone else's infrastructure.

Offline ECDSA licensing. Pro activation uses an on-device ECDSA signature verification. Your license key contains a compact cryptographic signature that the extension validates locally against a bundled public key. No phone-home, no activation server, no "check your email" flow. You can activate SnapLocal Pro in airplane mode on a machine that has never touched the internet.

Free annotations, one-time Pro

The free tier isn't crippled. You get region capture (Alt+Shift+S), all annotation tools — arrow, rectangle, ellipse, text, brush — plus an unlimited mosaic redactor for destroying sensitive pixels before anyone sees them. PNG and JPG export, clipboard copy, and a rolling local history of your last 20 captures are all free, forever, with no account.

Pro is a one-time $19 payment. Not $19/year. Not $19/month. Nineteen dollars once, and you own every future update. Pro lifts the history limit to unlimited captures, adds full-page scrolling capture, custom keyboard shortcuts, and priority access to new features as they ship. There is no subscription at any tier.

You can install SnapLocal free from the Chrome Web Store right now. No credit card, no email, no account.

What's next

Launch day is a milestone, not a finish line. Here's what's on the roadmap for the next few months:

Scrolling capture. Full-page screenshots that stitch automatically — the single most requested feature from our beta users. It's in development now and will ship as a Pro feature.

OCR text extraction. Select any region and pull the text out, processed entirely on-device using a bundled lightweight model. No cloud OCR service, no "upload to extract." Your pixels stay yours.

Pin-to-screen. Float a capture above all windows as a reference while you work — design comps, code snippets, chat messages. Always-on-top, always local, dismissible with a click.

None of these features will introduce an upload path. The architectural promise stays: zero host_permissions, zero network requests, zero external calls. New capabilities, same darkroom.

Come say hi on Product Hunt

If you care about screenshot privacy — or you're just curious what a zero-upload extension feels like in practice — head over to our Product Hunt page and say hello. Upvotes help other privacy-conscious people discover the tool, and we read every comment.

And if you'd rather skip the social ceremony and just try it: install SnapLocal free, press Alt+Shift+S, and draw a box. Your screenshot will be exactly where you left it — on your machine, in your browser, under your control.