Bookmarks Pal has three tiers, and the only thing that differs between them is how many decisions you can make. Every review mode, the extension, file import and export, staged and live mode are all available on every tier, including without an account. This page explains exactly what gets counted, because that is the part that is easy to misunderstand.
The three tiers
- Guest: 10 decisions. No account, no email address. Everything stays in your browser's local storage and nothing reaches our servers.
- Free account: 50 decisions. Adds cloud sync, so your queue and progress follow you between devices, and session history.
- Pro: unlimited. $15 a year, or $35 once. Also removes ads and adds access to features still in development.
What counts as a decision
These increment your count by one each:
- Keeping a bookmark
- Deleting a bookmark
- Moving a bookmark to another folder
- Saving a new bookmark from the extension's toolbar popup
These are free and unlimited on every tier:
- Switching between review modes, as often as you like
- Toggling random and in-order, or staged and live
- Browsing the folder tree, previewing a bookmark, opening a link
- Creating, renaming and reorganising folders
- Importing a bookmarks file, however large
- Exporting a cleaned bookmarks file
- Ending a session and viewing the summary
So importing four thousand bookmarks costs nothing. Looking through all of them costs nothing. Only the act of deciding is counted.
The count is cumulative, not per session
This is the detail people get wrong. A free account gets 50 decisions in total, ever, not 50 per day or per session. Sign in tomorrow and your count carries over.
The number shown above the progress bar is the all-time figure, and the number next to it is how many bookmarks remain in your current queue. They are deliberately different things.
The web app and the extension share one allowance
There is one count per account, not one per surface. A bookmark saved from the toolbar popup draws on the same 50 as a deletion made in the web app. The badge in the popup's top-right corner (12/50, and so on) shows that same shared total, so the two never disagree. Pro accounts see no badge, because there is nothing to count toward.
What happens when you hit the limit
Nothing is deleted, reverted or locked. The app stops accepting new decisions and shows the upgrade options. Specifically:
- Everything you have already decided stays decided.
- In staged mode, changes already queued are still there and can still be applied.
- You can still export a cleaned bookmarks file.
- You can still browse, preview and reorganise folders, because those were never counted.
- As a guest you are offered an account, which raises the cap from 10 to 50, and your guest progress carries over rather than being discarded.
Guest progress survives signing up
If you start as a guest and later create an account, the bookmarks you already actioned and your current session are migrated to the account on your first sign-in. You do not restart, and the 10 guest decisions count toward the 50 free total rather than being added on top.
This is also the point at which your data first reaches our servers. As a guest it never does. If that matters to you, guest mode is a complete, permanent option, not a teaser.
Ads
Guests and free accounts see one banner at the bottom of the review area. Paid plans see none. For visitors in the EEA, the UK and Switzerland, consent for personalised advertising is handled through Google's certified consent platform, which appears separately from our own cookie banner, and the two cover different processors, so seeing both is expected rather than a bug. Product analytics are gated behind our banner and collect nothing if you decline.
Choosing between yearly and lifetime
Lifetime pays for itself after about two years and four months. The honest recommendation for most people is lifetime, because bookmark cleanup is not a daily habit. It is something you do properly once, then return to every year or so when the pile has regrown. A subscription for a task with that rhythm is mostly a subscription you forget you have.
Yearly makes sense if you would rather not commit up front, or you have one large backlog to clear and expect to be finished with it.
Either can be cancelled or refunded within 14 days. Yearly subscriptions are managed from the account dialog and stay active until the end of the period you have paid for; if a subscription lapses, your account behaves like a free one again and nothing is deleted. The pricing page has the side-by-side comparison.