Why are you opening that site?Ask yourself first.

No. Blockers build walls; Why First asks a question. Every intervention can be continued past, and every rule can be paused or deleted. It works by awareness, not by force.

Browsing data never reaches us. Your rules, the domains you gate, the intent notes you write and your statistics stay in your browser's local extension storage. What we do hold is the record of what you bought: your account (email and name), your orders, the entitlement they grant, your AI intent judgment balance, the payments our payment partner reports to us, and a usage count for AI judgments that run through us. None of it contains a domain, a URL, a note, a page or a visit. Two flows leave the extension at all — the Pro license check and the AI reader you switch on — and the privacy policy describes exactly what each one carries.

Not to use Why First: rules, pauses, statistics and the license key all work with no account and no sign-in. You need one to claim the 30 free AI intent judgments, and to buy Pro or more judgments, because an order, an entitlement and a judgment balance have to belong to someone. The account holds your email, your orders and your judgment balance — never a domain, a note or a visit. Your browsing stays on your device either way.

You pay once on our payment partner's hosted checkout page. The partner is the merchant of record: it takes the payment, handles tax, issues the receipt, and its refund policy applies. The purchase is recorded in your Why First account — the order, the entitlement it grants and any AI intent judgments — and you receive a license key to keep. Paste that key into the extension: activation sends the license key, an anonymous install ID, the product ID, the app version and your browser family to our license service — no login, no email address, no browsing data. The service returns a signed credential that is stored locally, so the extension verifies Pro on its own from then on; refresh and deactivation send only the signed credential and the app version. A device that stays offline keeps Pro through a grace period of 60 days by default (configurable between 30 and 90), then falls back to Free — your rules, statistics and notes are never deleted — until the next successful check. While you are online the extension refreshes the license in the background, normally about once a week or two; refunded or revoked keys stop working at the next successful check, which is why we do not promise an exact revocation time.

One judgment is one call: Why First asks the AI to decide whether the note you wrote actually matches the site you are opening, and that call spends one judgment from the balance in your account. There is no hidden exchange rate — 10,000 judgments are 10,000 judgments. Pro includes 10,000 while the launch offer lasts (5,000 at the regular price); a verified Free account gets 30 to try, and Pro users can top up 5,000 judgments for just $3. A judgment that runs through Why First sends your note, the domain and any site note you wrote to our judgment service, which passes them to our AI provider and keeps the usage count — not the text and not the verdict. Pro can also point the extension at your own AI provider or endpoint, or point it at Ollama running on your own machine with your own API key: that costs no judgments at all and your notes never touch our service — any cost from your own provider remains yours.

Chrome and Firefox at launch, on the same Manifest V3 codebase with pixel-identical UI. Edge works via the Chrome Web Store. Safari is not promised yet.

Any time. Pause one rule from the toolbar popup, or disable everything in settings. Why First is a tool you hold, not a cage you live in.