The person who sets the block list should not be the only person who can lift it.
Gatesites blocks the sites you name in Chrome. Then it lets somebody else set the password, so at eleven at night the block list is still somebody else's decision.
Free. No account. Nothing leaves your computer.
Not right now.
This site is on your block list.
- Address
- reddit.com/r/all
- Stopped by
- reddit.com
- Today
- 7 blocks so far
Every blocker you control is a blocker you will switch off.
That is not a character flaw. It is the design. A tool that answers to you will answer to you at the exact moment you least want it to, and the undo is two clicks away in the same settings page you used to set it up.
Gatesites is built around the opposite arrangement. You decide what to block while you are thinking clearly. Somebody you trust sets the password and keeps the recovery code. From then on the list is a thing you would have to ask about, out loud, to a person.
If nobody is available to hold it, the pause still helps on its own. Every attempt to open a blocked site starts a countdown you configured, and the password box does not appear until it ends. Most urges do not survive a minute of watching a number go down.
What it does
Everything here is in the extension. There is no paid tier, because there is no server to pay for.
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Blocking
Sites, paths, patterns
A bare domain covers the whole site. Add a path to block one section and leave the rest open, or wrap a pattern in slashes for a real regular expression.
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Blocking
Categories
Social, video, news, shopping, games, gambling, adult and AI chatbots. The lists ship inside the extension and are matched on your machine.
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Blocking
Keywords
Block any address containing a word. Turn on page scanning and the word is caught in the page text too, which is how search results and feeds get past an address-only filter.
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Blocking
Allow-list mode
Shut the entire web except the sites you name. Severe, and the right setting for a machine that exists to do one job.
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Timing
Schedules
Rules that apply only inside the windows you set, by day and hour, including windows that cross midnight. Any window can be marked as one the password will not open.
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Timing
Daily allowances
Twenty minutes of a site a day, then it closes. Time is counted against the tab you are actually looking at, and stops counting when you walk away from the machine.
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Timing
Lockdown
Shut the whole web except the sites you name, for a set number of hours. Nothing overrides it while it runs, not the pause switch and not a one-site exception, and it ends by itself.
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Timing
Focus sessions
Twenty five minutes or fifty, from the toolbar. A strict session shuts everything outside your allowed list and cannot be ended early by anyone, including you.
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The page
Your own block page
Your heading, your sentence, or a redirect to somewhere useful instead. A line you wrote to yourself lands harder than anything we could write for you.
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Records
Insights
Blocks per day, where the time went, the sites you keep trying. Sixty days of history, kept on the machine that produced it.
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Records
An audit log
Every unlock, every exception, every wrong guess, with a timestamp. The person holding the password can read it without asking you anything.
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Control
Timed exceptions
One site opened for ten minutes rather than the whole list opened indefinitely. The exception expires on its own and re-blocks the tab.
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Control
Backup and restore
Export your rules as one file and load them on another machine. Statistics and the password stay where they are.
How the password works
Three minutes, once, with the other person in the room or on a call while you share your screen.
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You set the rules
Block list, categories, schedules, whatever you want held. Do this part yourself, while you are the version of you that wants the blocks.
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They set the password
Hand over the keyboard. They pick a password, decide how long the pause before the password box should be, and choose whether you may open one site at a time or must go through them for everything.
They also enter their name, which then appears at the bottom of every block page, so it is obvious who to ask.
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They keep the recovery code
A twenty character code is shown once, with a print button. It works anywhere the password works. It is the only way back in if the password is forgotten, and it is theirs to keep, not yours.
What the password actually protects
| Setting | What it means |
|---|---|
| The pause | How long you sit and look at a countdown before the password box appears at all. Up to five minutes. |
| The settings | The block list, categories, keywords and schedules cannot be edited without the password. |
| The pause switch | Blocking cannot be turned off without the password. |
| One-site exceptions | Whether you may open a single site for a few minutes with the password, or whether every exception goes through them. |
| Session length | How long one correct password stays good before it has to be entered again. |
| No-way-out windows | Hours in which the password opens nothing at all. Deep work in the morning, or after midnight. |
Wrong guesses get slower on purpose: after the third attempt the wait doubles each time, up to five minutes, and every attempt is written into the log.
It does not phone home, because there is no home to phone
A site blocker sees every address you visit. That is not a detail, it is the most sensitive list a browser extension can hold. Gatesites has no account, no sign-in, no sync service and no analytics. It makes no network requests of any kind, and the fonts it draws itself with are bundled in the download rather than fetched from a font service.
Your rules, your statistics and the password digest live in this browser's own storage. The category lists ship inside the extension instead of being looked up, which is slightly less exhaustive than a live feed and very much more private.
What it will not do
Worth reading before you rely on it, particularly if you are setting it up for somebody else.
- It cannot stop the extension being removed. Anyone with the browser open can go to the extensions page and delete Gatesites, and no extension in Chrome can prevent that. What Gatesites does instead is make removal the only route, which is a deliberate, obvious act rather than a quiet toggle. On a managed or school-issued machine, an administrator can force-install it so it cannot be removed.
- It is one browser, not the device. Another browser, another profile, or a phone will not be affected. Blocking at the router or through DNS filtering covers the device; this covers Chrome. They are complementary, not alternatives.
- The category lists are not exhaustive. They cover the sites people name when they ask for a category, plus keyword and domain-suffix heuristics for the adult category. For a child's machine, treat it as one layer among several.
- It is not on the Chrome Web Store yet. For now it installs from a file with developer mode turned on, which Chrome will remind you about at each startup. The install page walks through it.
- Lose the password and the recovery code and it stays locked. There is no reset link and no support address that can help, because neither the password nor anything derived from it ever leaves your machine. Removing the extension is the way out.
Get Gatesites
Chrome, Edge, Brave and anything else built on Chromium, version 108 or newer. Around ten seconds to install and a couple of minutes to set up properly.