When Shelf earns its keep.

Shelf Free has unlimited saves, full exports to Markdown, Notion, Obsidian, and Logseq, collections (1 level deep), and the habit features. It will not nag you. Most readers can stop here.

Shelf Pro is for readers who use Shelf every day and want the parts of the product that are computationally or operationally expensive — AI inference, multi-destination routing, library-scale operations — to be theirs. It’s €4.99/month, €49.99/year, or €99.99 once as a Founder Lifetime (capped at 200 buyers; once the cap is hit, the option closes).

AI auto-tag

When Pro is active and you’ve enabled AI in the Options page’s Step five · AI · Pro card and ticked Generate on save, every save runs through a small classifier that returns three to six topical tags. The classifier prefers Chrome’s on-device Gemini Nano model — no network call, no API key, the inference runs in your browser. On machines where Nano is unavailable (older Chrome versions, ChromeOS Flex, low-RAM Linux), Shelf falls back to Groq’s hosted inference, and you supply your own Groq API key in the same card.

Both the AI toggle and the Generate on save toggle are off by default. Turn them on once and Shelf remembers. The suggested tags are stored as aiTags on the item; on export they are merged with your own tags so there is no separate “AI” namespace.

You can also trigger inference manually on a saved item. Each row in the popup carries a small ai button (it changes to redo ai once AI tags are present on that item). Click it and Shelf runs the same classifier against that one item, regardless of whether Generate on save was on at the time of the save. The button is useful in two situations: you turned the auto-tag toggle on after a long stretch of saves and want to backfill an older article; or the classifier got it wrong on a fresh save and you want a second pass.

Manual inference still requires Pro and AI to be enabled in the Step five · AI · Pro card. If either is off, the button surfaces an inline error instead of running. The button shows thinking while the call is in flight and reverts to ai / redo ai on success.

AI auto-summary

The same inference run produces a three-bullet summary, each bullet under 140 characters and factual. The summary is stored as aiSummary on the item and is included in every export — under an ## AI summary heading in the Markdown body, as a heading + bulleted list in Notion, as an [!summary] callout in Obsidian, and as a nested bullet list in Logseq.

Summaries are best-effort. They are wrong sometimes. Do not cite them; cite the original.

Unlimited destinations

Free readers have two destinations active at once. Pro readers have no limit. The same save fans out to as many configured destinations as you have.

Multi-database Notion routing

Free Notion users have one database. Pro Notion users can map each collection to its own database. The full setup is in the Notion docs.

Smart Rules

A Smart Rule is a condition → action that runs the moment a save lands in the library. Smart Rules are a Pro-only feature — Free readers can save and organise by hand; rules are the automation layer on top. The full reference is in the collections docs.

Bulk operations

Library Tools (Pro) lets you filter the library by a small set of criteria and run a single action across every matching item:

— Filter by hostname (substring match), kind (article / video / podcast / page), and unread-only. — Add a tag to every matching item in one shot. — Delete every matching item.

That’s the whole tool — no query language, no move/re-send actions in v1. Use the preview to see how many items the filter would touch before you run the action.

Library backup

The Step seven · Library tools card has two export buttons: Markdown archive writes a ZIP containing one Markdown file per saved item plus a library.json manifest; Full JSON dump writes a single .json file with the lossless state — items, collection definitions, collection memberships, Smart Rules, AI configuration, and the list of active destinations. Together they’re a complete portrait of your Shelf state at one moment in time.

This is the answer to what happens if Shelf shuts down and what happens if Chrome corrupts its storage. Run it once a month. Two seconds.

Activating a license

After your Stripe checkout completes, our webhook issues you a license key and emails it to you. Open Shelf’s Options page → Billing → paste the key → Activate. The mechanics — the JWT format, the seat cap, the seven-day cache, the thirty-day grace period — are covered on their own page under Licenses & devices.