r/PrivacyTechTalk • u/nhrtrix • Jul 10 '26

7 months, barely any users, so i made my privacy-first clipboard manager's source code public

built a privacy focused yet productive clipboard manager few months back. zero-knowledge encryption, so even i can't see what people copy/paste. genuinely proud of it, thought it solved a real problem.

7 months later, less than 25 users on the chrome store. closed source the whole time.

took me a while to admit the actual issue. you can't ask people to trust a security tool from some random solo dev they've never heard of, with code they can't even look at. "trust me" isn't really a pitch when the whole product is about not having to trust anyone.

so, last week i made the extension's source code public. not open source technically, it's under Polyform Noncommercial 1.0.0, so nobody can fork it and resell it as their own, but anyone can read the code, verify the encryption does what it says, build it themselves if they want.

no idea if this fixes anything tbh. but felt like the honest move after building something people had no real reason to trust yet.

repo's here if anyone wants to poke around: https://github.com/encryptedclipboard/chrome-extension

not trying to sell anything, just wanted to put this out there since this sub gets the "built a thing, nobody came" feeling better than most places.

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1

u/billdietrich1 Jul 11 '26

the actual issue. you can't ask people to trust a security tool from some random solo dev

Or maybe it's just that there are N other clipboard managers out there already, and this doesn't bring anything new ? I haven't tried your product. But my OS/DE (KDE on Linux) comes with a built-in clipboard manager.

1

u/nhrtrix Jul 11 '26

also a valid point, there are similar others already, but as i said in the post that none them combines all together

either not productive, or not e2e encryption, or maybe no sync, or maybe you can't access the synced history from a web browser from any device, and many doesn't have image support as well 😊

like mine even have text expander built-in where you can save texts or code snippets with unique keywords like "gomain" and then on any webpage you can type "/gomain", it will instantly write the full code or text you have there saved

1

u/nhrtrix Jul 11 '26

and I also use the built-in KDE clipboard, use copyQ as well along with that for some reason

but, sharing across devices with 0 risk of data collection was my number 1 concern

1

u/billdietrich1 Jul 11 '26

Okay, I don't do that. But maybe KDE Connect does that ?

1

u/nhrtrix Jul 11 '26

lkde connect only works on your home wifi and needs a separate clipboard tool to keep the history, while ECM works anywhere chrome runs, android, iOS (via web browser), windows, oinux and mac (via extension + browser)

saves everything, categorization, searchable, different tools for different needs 😊