What Deft Foundry is, and what it deliberately is not

Deft Foundry is a workshop, not a product. Each extension on the shelf is small on purpose: it does one job, it works without an account, and it keeps what it reads inside your own browser.

What the shelf shares is the boring half — one sign-in, one place your purchases live, one support address. That is the entire reason the umbrella exists. A tool that only needs to be small should not also have to become a company: its own domain, its own checkout, its own privacy page, its own everything.

The problem with how small tools usually arrive

Two shapes dominate, and neither fits a job that takes ten seconds.

The first is the free thing that is abandoned. It solved the problem once, it is now three Chrome versions behind, and the last commit is from a year the author has stopped mentioning. It was free because nothing was ever going to pay for the maintenance, and maintenance is most of what a browser extension is.

The second is the $9-a-month platform. It works, it is maintained, and it wants to be your workflow — a dashboard, an onboarding sequence, a team plan and a reason to log in on Monday. That business model needs you to keep needing it, which is a strange thing to ask of a tool whose entire job is to get out of the way.

The gap between them is real and it is not small: things that are worth building properly and are not worth building a company around.

What that means in practice

Every extension ships something genuinely usable for free. Not a trailer for the paid version — the tool. Paying is how you keep a thing, not how you try it.

Where a tool is worth paying for, it is a one-time purchase. A tool that runs on your own machine cannot honestly answer "why pay again next month". So none of these renew, and there is nothing to cancel.

Buying one never unlocks another, and never charges you for one. The account is a convenience, not a bundle. What each thing costs is on the pricing page, per extension.

Your account lives on this site and nowhere else. The extensions do not need it to work; it exists so a purchase survives a new laptop and so a receipt has somewhere to live.

What the umbrella deliberately does not do

It does not make the extensions talk to each other, and it does not build a "platform" out of them. They share a sign-in and a checkout — that is the whole integration, and adding more would recreate exactly the thing this exists to avoid.

It also does not centralise your data. Each extension keeps what it collects in your browser's own storage. Where a feature genuinely cannot run locally, it is named as such on that extension's own page — Redkeep's is the one to read first — and in its own privacy policy, one document per extension, because a policy written to cover all of them at once would describe none of them accurately. The shelf's own policy covers what this site holds, which is an account and a receipt.

Questions

Q: Do I need an account to use the extensions? A: No. Every extension ships a free tier that works without signing in. An account exists for the paid tier and for carrying a purchase between machines. You can see what is on the shelf and what each one costs.

Q: Where does my data go? A: Into your own browser. These are local-first tools — they read what they need on the page you are already looking at and store it locally. This site holds only your account and your purchases, which is what the privacy page sets out in full.

Q: Why one site instead of one per tool? A: Because the overhead of shipping a small tool is almost entirely paperwork — a domain, a checkout, a privacy policy, a support inbox. Sharing that once is what makes a tool this small worth building at all.

Q: What happens if you stop working on one of these? A: A one-time purchase buys that extension's paid tier for as long as the service operates, and the free tier needs no server at all — it keeps working in your browser whatever happens here. The full terms, including refunds, are on the terms page.