Notes that live on the page
Leave a note on any webpage. It's there when you come back.
Add to Chrome — freeOpen a page, write a note, close the tab. Come back next month and the note is already there — on that page, at the size and spot you left it.
What Pagenail can see
Your notes are stored by Chrome on your own computer. Not on a server — there isn't an account to make, and there's nowhere for the notes to go.
What gets saved is the page's address — hostname and path, without the query string — and the words you typed, plus your preferences. Pagenail never keeps a copy of the page itself. It reads the page to place your notes and measure the layout, and none of that is stored or sent anywhere. Your note is your writing, not a copy of theirs; when the page changes, your note stays as you wrote it.
One thing does leave your computer, and it's worth saying plainly: the dashboard loads site icons from Google's public favicon service, so the domains you've taken notes on are visible to Google while that tab is open. No note text is involved. Nothing else is transmitted, and nothing is recorded in the background as you browse.
The flip side of local storage is that removing the extension takes your notes with it. Export a backup first — one JSON file with every note and preference, which imports straight back. Full detail in Privacy and your data.
Questions
Is it free?
Yes, and nothing in the version you can install today sits behind a paywall: unlimited notes, stickies, the dashboard, search, and every export format. Your notes are stored on your own machine, so there's no server bill to pass on to you.
If a paid plan arrives it will be for the things that need a server — syncing between machines, sharing a note by link. Whatever you've already written stays readable and exportable either way.
Do I need an account?
No. There's no sign-up, no setup and no sign-in screen — install the extension and it's live on every tab. Notes are saved in Chrome's storage on your computer. The trade is that they don't follow you to a second machine and don't survive removing the extension, which is exactly what an account will be for later.
Which browsers does it work in?
Chrome on the desktop. Pagenail is a Chrome extension and installs from the Chrome Web Store.
Other Chromium browsers — Edge, Brave, Arc, Vivaldi — install Chrome extensions and will very likely run it, but none of them are tested, so treat them as unsupported for now. Firefox and Safari need a separately built and reviewed extension, and neither exists yet.
Does it work on PDFs, webmail, and pages behind a login?
Pages behind a login are fine. Pagenail runs there like it does anywhere else, and it only ever saves the page address and the words you typed — never the page itself. Webmail works.
PDFs don't, including PDFs served over https. Neither do http:// pages, files you opened from your disk, Chrome's own pages — settings, the new tab, the extensions list — or the Chrome Web Store. Chrome doesn't let any extension run in those places, so there's no workaround; you'll notice because the dock won't appear.
What happens if the page changes?
A note is keyed to the page's hostname and path. The query string, the #fragment and a trailing slash are all ignored, so a link full of tracking parameters lands on the same notes as a clean one. Two things do separate notes: a different path, and www.example.com versus example.com.
The page's content changing doesn't disturb your note — it stays where you put it, worded exactly as you left it. Pagenail holds the note against the address, not against the words on the page, so an edited or restructured article leaves your note untouched.
Can I get my notes out?
Always, by three routes. Copy puts a note on the clipboard as Markdown and as formatted HTML at the same time, so it pastes as plain text into an editor and as real formatting into Notion or an email. Export downloads a single note, or everything on a page, as .md, .html or .txt. Export backup in settings writes every note and preference to one JSON file, and imports it back again.
One thing to know rather than discover: because notes live in Chrome on your machine, removing the extension deletes them. Take a backup before you uninstall or reload it.
What's coming next?
Sync first, then sharing. Sync means an optional account, so your notes survive a reinstall and show up on your other machine — the one thing local storage can't do for you. Sharing a note by link is built but not switched on yet. Neither changes how the extension works on its own; an account will stay optional.