Gimme Bar

» see gimmebar.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The slogan was printed on the front of the site and it was also the entire engineering spec. Don't bookmark the web. Save it. A bookmark is an address, and an address is a promise made by somebody else that they will keep serving the same bytes at the same place forever. Nobody keeps that promise. Gimme Bar's answer was to take a copy.

You installed a bookmarklet. When something caught your eye, you clicked it, and the actual asset went into your library in the cloud. The jpeg itself, or the block of quoted text, with the source URL filed alongside it as provenance. Items went into collections, which you could make public or keep to yourself, and you could tag them. That was the whole product and it did not need to be any bigger.

It came out of Fictive Kin, the Brooklyn studio run by Cameron Koczon and his partners. The same people made TeuxDeux and Very Goods, and ran the Brooklyn Beta conference every year. Gimme Bar was a product among several in a studio that also took client work, and in 2012 it was part of an unusual studio financing deal with betaworks. The beta went around the design web by word of mouth, surfacing on swissmiss in 2011, which tells you exactly who the first thousand users were.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

Designers used Gimme Bar. That was not my crowd. My own saving in 2011 was a browser bookmarks folder I never reopened, and paying somebody to store a jpeg so that it still loaded in five years read to me as a luxury rather than as a hedge. The jpeg did not load in five years. I was just not the one making the argument.

Where it did land, it landed properly. A mood board for a working designer is a professional tool, and an image that has gone 404 is a tool that broke. Gimme Bar solved that before Pinterest existed, and then Pinterest existed.

~ the fall ~

Pinterest did a worse version of the job for a vastly larger audience and charged nothing, because its business was never storage. Gimme Bar's business was storage, and that is a bill that arrives every month whether or not anyone logs in. A product whose unit economics get heavier as users accumulate history needs its user count to keep growing. Gimme Bar's stopped.

Fictive Kin moved further into client services across the mid-2010s. The studio's own products got the hours that were left over, and by 2017 the Gimme Bar codebase had aged into the category of software that is risky to touch and expensive to leave alone.

~ the exit they did right ~

The announcement went up on 6 December 2017, signed by Cameron. "After 8 years of building and supporting Gimme Bar, we've reached a sad milestone and it's time to shut down the product." The stated reasons were usage low enough and costs high enough that there was no more denying it. He also wrote that the team at Fictive Kin were emotionally attached to the old Gimbles and had a hard time letting go.

From the next day you could log in and request your data: a zip of your actual saved files with a JSON index of the collections they belonged to. Backups were to be held for at least six months after that. Some exports took a week and needed an email to chase, which is a complaint worth putting in context, because the standard industry practice for a dead bookmarking service is to return nothing at all and take the images with it.

gimmebar.com does not resolve in 2026. Nobody renewed it, and nobody repointed it at a coupon farm either.

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