Built local-first, on purpose.
Artkive is a private roster for the artists you discover. No account, no cloud and no tracking — because a tool for keeping your own research should answer to no one but you.
Bookmarks forget. Spreadsheets quit. History expires.
Everyone who hires or commissions artists has the same folder called Later — full of URLs with no names, no skills, no rates, and no memory of why they mattered. Artkive keeps the whole profile instead, and keeps it on your machine.
Discovery is not the hard part. You already find good artists constantly — on ArtStation at midnight, in a Behance tab you meant to close. Retrieval is the hard part, and it fails months later, when it is expensive.
A sync service would be easier to build and easier to sell. It would also mean a database somewhere holding your unreleased shortlist and what you pay people. We would rather not have that, so we did not build the place to put it.
Local-first means no cross-device sync and no recovery if you wipe the browser. Export to JSON is the backup, and it is yours to run. We think that is the right trade; the export button is there so you can disagree.
Private by architecture, not by promise.
A promise is a sentence someone can change their mind about. This is a drawing of where your roster can go, and the drawing has no exit.
No account, no server, no analytics
Your roster lives in your browser’s local database and nowhere else. There is no backend that could receive it.
It asks for access to all sites at install
Chrome shows you that warning. It’s the honest cost of a side panel that can capture whatever tab you’re on, and we’d rather name it than bury it.
That access is only used when you act
Nothing is read in the background. The script that runs on its own is limited to the seven supported platforms, independent of the permission above.
Screenshots never leave the device
Pages you bookmark are captured and downscaled locally, then stored in your browser. They are never uploaded.
One optional outbound path
Supply your own Anthropic API key and profile text goes to api.anthropic.com for tag suggestions. Off by default, and yours to revoke.
Questions, answered.
Is it free?
Yes, and it stays free. There is no paid tier, no trial and nothing to subscribe to.
Which sites does one-click capture work on?
ArtStation, Behance, Dribbble, Cara, The Rookies, Coroflot and Vimeo. Reference images and page bookmarks work on any page.
Why does it need access to every website?
The capture tools run from a side panel that stays open as you move between tabs, and Chrome’s per-click permission never reaches the tab you’re looking at from there. Granting it at install is what makes capture work first time.
Where does my data actually live?
In your browser’s local storage, on the machine you saved it from. Nothing syncs, because there is nothing to sync to.
Can I get my data back out?
Export the whole roster to JSON whenever you like. Re-importing merges by profile URL and keeps the tags and notes you added.