Huge thank you to @linusgsebastian and @luke_lafr for checking out Vinegar on the @LinusTech WAN Show!
Luke’s original “anti-Honey” browser extension idea is what kicked this whole thing off for us: shopping online is convenient, but ownership, parent companies, affiliate incentives, and alternatives are way too hidden.
Vinegar is our attempt at making that more transparent.
It’s a browser extension that surfaces brand ownership chains while you shop, so you can better understand whose pocket your money goes into.
We’re not pretending it’s the finished version of the idea yet. Luke was right: the independent alternatives piece is probably the hard part, and what exists today is the foundation.
Since the WAN Show mention, we’ve already made a bunch of improvements:
- Firefox add-on is now live
- Ownership cards have been restyled to be cleaner and less intrusive
- Avoid List search/picking is better when multiple companies match
- Cards now more clearly separate registry data, community context, sources, ownership chains, and flags
We also want to be very clear on privacy.
Random shopping browser extensions should be treated with skepticism by default.
Vinegar is bootstrapped, not VC-funded. We don’t sell user data, we don’t monetize through ads, and we don’t want to become the thing this product is supposed to push back against.
The extension only runs on supported product pages and reads the brand name needed to check our ownership database.
We don’t read your cart, purchase data, full page HTML, or track you across unrelated sites.
Revenue comes from Premium memberships, not selling out users.
What we’re working on next:
- Independent/product alternatives
- More supported retailers
- Filtering for alternatives, like non-publicly traded, veteran-owned, worker-owned, local, etc.
- More ways to let users decide what companies they personally want to avoid
We think of Vinegar as an index, not an authority.
The goal is transparency, not telling people what they should or shouldn’t buy.
Thanks again to Linus and Luke for giving the idea attention and fair skepticism. That feedback genuinely helped us sharpen what Vinegar needs to become.
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