The manifesto
Your research should outlive the tool you kept it in.
Three beliefs behind SyncMyCopy, and the trade-offs each one costs me.
The moment this exists to prevent
It is 4:47 on a Thursday.
The draft is due in the morning and you are one proof point short.
You know you read it. Three weeks ago, maybe four. You can still picture the page: the stat sat about halfway down, just under a chart, and you remember thinking that is the line that makes the whole argument.
So you go looking. The bookmarks folder you keep meaning to organise. The forty tabs you have been carrying between machines like hand luggage. A screenshot called IMG_4839.png. A Notion page you last touched in 2023. The other laptop, where you are now fairly sure you actually read it.
Forty minutes later, you write around it.
Nothing was lost. That is the frustrating part. You saved it, and you saved it carefully.
Saving was never the hard part. Finding it again, on the day it mattered, on whichever machine you happened to be sitting at, is where it fell apart.
What a tool owes you
If something is going to hold your research, it should be able to answer three questions.
Not with a promise on a pricing page. With how it is actually built, in ways you can go and verify yourself.
Your library should outlive the tool that holds it.
When Pocket shut down in 2025, its users got 90 days to retrieve years of saved reading before it was deleted for good. Nobody had done anything wrong. The company simply stopped, and everything it was holding stopped with it.
Every research tool you use is one acquisition, one pivot, one quiet Tuesday announcement away from the same email. So SyncMyCopy does not hold your research at all. Your highlights, notes, snapshots, clips and projects are written to a folder in your own Google Drive, under your own account, from the first thing you save.
I am one person. I might get bored, get hit by a bus, or simply fail to make this work as a business. None of that should be your problem.
If SyncMyCopy disappeared overnight, what would happen to everything you saved? Nothing at all. It never lived with me. It has been sitting in your Drive the whole time, and it will still be there in ten years.
One library, on every browser you use.
You do not have a Chrome self and a Brave self. You have one head, one set of references, one running argument you are trying to build. The software should not make you keep three versions of it.
Highlight a paragraph on the laptop, and it is already on the desktop. Bookmark something in one browser and every other browser running SyncMyCopy has it. Not exported and re-imported on a Sunday. The same library, arriving on its own, in seconds.
This sounds like a feature. It is really a position: your research belongs to you, not to the browser profile you happened to open it in.
Open a different browser and go looking for something you saved this morning. It should feel like you never switched. No export step, no "sync now", no wondering which machine has the good version.
Private because I cannot read it, not because I promise not to.
Most privacy policies are a statement of intent. They describe what a company currently chooses to do with data it fully controls, and they can be rewritten the moment the incentives change.
That seemed like the wrong thing to ask you to rely on. Your content never reaches my servers in the first place. It goes from your browser to your own Drive. AI features run on an API key you supply, calling your provider directly from your browser, so your highlights never pass through me on the way there either.
I do not have a copy of your research. Not one I choose not to look at. Not one I keep safe. I do not have it, so there is nothing for me to sell, leak, hand over, or quietly start training on in two years.
The question is not whether you trust me. It is what I could do if you were wrong to. Check the permissions the extension asks for, and where the data actually goes. The answer should hold up without taking my word for anything.
The honest part
Every one of these rules something out.
These are constraints, not features. Each one closes a door that most tools in this category leave wide open, and a few of those doors are where the money usually is.
- No network effects. Your library is private and lives in your Drive, so there is no shared graph of what everyone is reading to grow on top of.
- No data to sell, and none to train on. The most valuable asset a tool like this could accumulate is the one I deliberately never collect.
- No lock-in to fall back on. You can export everything, or just walk away and read your files straight out of Drive. I have to keep earning it instead.
- No AI margin. Bring your own key means you pay your provider their rate, not my rate with a markup on top.
The trade is deliberate. A tool you keep years of research in should be boring, durable and a little bit hard to profit from at your expense.
Save it once. Find it on the day it matters.
On whichever browser you happen to be sitting at, for as long as you keep the folder. That is the whole promise.
Built by one person, in the open, for people who read for a living.
SyncMyCopy