I’ll talk you out of Pro first.
That’s not a marketing trick — it’s the only honest way to write this page. I built Second Bookmark Bar, I set the price, and right now every single one of the extension’s 1,000-plus weekly users is on the free plan. Nobody has been forced into an upgrade to get the core product working, and that’s on purpose. So before you read a feature comparison, here’s the one-sentence answer: everything is free and stays local except two things — more than one video folder, and cloud sync with shared spaces.
Want the numbers only, no narrative? Every free-vs-Pro limit, in one table.
Everything else below — the second bar itself, all seven folder slots, search, save, adaptive switching, cleanup — is free, forever, with no account and no trial clock running out on you.
What’s actually free
- The second bookmark bar itself, with no cap on how many bookmarks or folders you put in it.
- All seven quick-switch folder slots, each with its own icon, plus
Alt+1/Alt+2/Alt+3to jump between the first three from the keyboard. - Search from the bar, with folder and domain context, without opening Bookmark Manager.
- Picker-first save — the current page saves into the folder you choose, not a guessed destination.
- Adaptive domain switching — the bar can auto-switch folders based on the site you’re on, with a star indicator showing when a rule is active.
- Duplicate detection with user-directed cleanup, restore points before risky operations, undo on sorts, and full export/import.
- One active video folder — thumbnail cards, duration badges, drag-first saving, and tags and playlists you define yourself, capped at two tags and two playlists per video (Pro removes that cap).
If your setup is one machine, one Chrome profile, and one “stuff I’m watching right now” video pile, that list is the whole product. There’s genuinely nothing missing.
What Pro actually adds
Pro is two things, not ten:
- All seven slots as video folders instead of one. If one video library covers your whole use case, you don’t need this. If you want to keep, say, a course you’re taking, a work-reference pile, and a personal watch list as three separate libraries instead of one shared bucket, this is what buys you the other six.
- Cloud sync and shared spaces. Sign in with Google and your bookmark roots, settings, and shared spaces get backed up and synced across every browser you use. It’s local-first by default — cloud reads only happen when you explicitly trigger them, writes push up automatically — so it’s a backup-and-sync layer on top of Chrome’s own bookmarks, not a replacement data store. Shared spaces add the team side: invite people, manage pooled seats, hand off a folder structure without exporting your entire personal setup.
That’s it. No feature is held back to pressure a single-device, single-library user into paying — the free tier isn’t a trial, it’s the actual product minus those two specific things.
Pro is billed at €4.99/month or €47.90/year (20% off) through Stripe. No long-term contract: cancel any time and you drop back to the free plan’s terms, not to nothing.
What happens if you lapse
If a Pro subscription lapses, you don’t lose your bookmarks and you don’t get locked out cold. You keep read-only access to your cloud data during a grace period, and local export always works regardless of subscription status — your data was never only in the cloud to begin with, since the extension reads and writes Chrome’s own bookmark tree by default.
What happens if you uninstall
Nothing dramatic. Second Bookmark Bar works by editing the same bookmark tree Chrome already has — it doesn’t run its own separate database for your bookmarks. Uninstall the extension and what’s left behind is exactly what you’d expect: standard Chrome bookmarks, in the folders you already built, readable and editable with no extension installed at all.
Where your data actually lives, either way
The short version, covered in more depth on the site’s own permissions and privacy breakdown: no analytics, no remote code, no bookmark data sent to me as the developer. Free-tier data lives in Chrome bookmarks and Chrome’s local storage. Cloud sync is the one place data leaves your machine, and only after you’ve explicitly signed in with Google and started a paid subscription — it was never on by default and never will be.
Who should skip Pro entirely
Honestly, most people reading this right now. If you’re on one computer, don’t need a second person to see your folders, and one video folder covers your actual watch-later habit — which for most people it does — paying for Pro buys you nothing you’d notice day to day. The two things Pro adds are real, but specific: more machines, more people, or more separate video libraries. If none of those describe you, the free plan isn’t a limited version of the product. It’s the product, full stop.
If you do fit one of those cases — multiple devices, a team, or you’re the kind of person running several video libraries at once — I’ve written up what that looks like in practice for a developer’s specific bookmark setup and for organizing videos into real folders instead of one shared pile, both starting from the free tier and scaling up only where it actually earns its keep. And if any of the standing questions above weren’t covered here, the site FAQ has the rest.