Launching Margin — a Chrome extension that replaces doom-scrolling news feeds with a quick side-panel check-in
Hi everyone!
Launching Margin today — a Chrome extension I built solo over the past weekend, and just shipped on Product Hunt.
The problem
I kept doing the same thing every morning: open four or five news sites, skim headlines, close most tabs without reading anything. That's not "staying informed," it's just friction with extra steps — and every one of
those sites wants me to keep scrolling, not get the headline and move on.
What Margin does
It turns Chrome's side panel into a swipeable stack of bite-sized news cards — one headline, a short summary, and a source, one story at a time. Pick your topics once, then tap through your day's news in a couple of minutes without leaving whatever page you're already on. Tap any card to read the full article at the publisher.
How it's built
- No account, no tracking, no analytics, no backend — settings and reading stats live entirely on your device
- Optional AI summaries run on-device via Chrome's built-in Summarizer — article text never reaches a server
- 25 curated topics from publishers like BBC, The Guardian, and The New York Times
- Five themes, a reading-insights dashboard, and an always-live feed on the paid tier
Pricing
Free covers 3 topics, two themes, and a 30-minute refresh — enough for casual reading. Margin Plus is $1.99/mo for unlimited topics, every theme, a live feed, and your personal reading stats.
Paid tier runs on Lemon Squeezy license keys — no subscription infrastructure I had to build
myself.
Where it's at
Live on the Chrome Web Store and just launched on Product Hunt today.
First public launch for me — would genuinely appreciate an upvote if this is useful to you, and even more so any feedback on whether the "one card at a time" reading format actually works better than a normal feed, or just feels limiting.
https://www.producthunt.com/products/margin-4
Happy to answer anything — about the product, the Chrome side panel API,or going the license-key route instead of full subscription billing.
Congrats on the ship, Mohan. The side-panel-API move is the right one — chrome.sidePanel gives you a native feel without the user opening a new tab, and the kill-the-feed framing is sharp.
The piece I'd push on early: pull-in vs push-out. You're pulling news cards in; my own extension lives on the inverse gesture — highlight or annotate a screenshot on whatever page I'm reading, and push it out to whichever model I want (Claude/ChatGPT/Gemini/DeepSeek). Same primitive, opposite direction. Pairs naturally as a "read/think" complement to a "read/skim" tool like yours.
One question on the on-device summarizer: are you running the summary through a local model (Ollama, a small SLM) or sending the cards to a hosted API? The privacy framing lands harder with the first, but the latency/quality trade-off is real for short news blurbs. Curious which way you went.
What stood out to me is that the one-card format isn't just a presentation choice.
It feels like an opinion about why people end up consuming more news than they intended.
I'd be curious whether users end up valuing the constraint itself, or whether the constraint simply attracts people who already wanted a different relationship with news.
Those could lead to very different conclusions from the same usage patterns.