"'The attention economy has gotten out of control'... and apparently, so is the subscription economy! It's highly ironic to want to 'free' us from one toxic system (YouTube's algorithms), only to lock us straight into another (the perpetual monthly subscription)."

Recently the developer, in their infinite wisdom, has decided to enshittify the addon. Taking many of the most useful features i.e. removing the most annoying parts of yt and locked it behind a paywall.

The truly egregious part? It's a monthly subscription. For an addon that requires no servers to host or function. Not a one time payment, not a donation, a monthly subscription where I'm expected to give over not just money but my details to and sign in on every device and browser I use yt on.

A truly baffling choice to go straight to. No preceding call for other developers, fundraiser, or donation drive which would have been understandable and I would have been likely to donate to as I did truly enjoy using the project. I have been a staunch advocate for this for at least a year telling other to install it to make their yt experience better and I've now had umpteen of those people telling me that it's broken and asking them for money and now I feel like a fool because I recommended it and have to tell them to install something else or in many cases due to lack of technical skill do myself physically.

The dev responses are also comically missing the point. Telling us the pricing is $3 a month or $24 per year like it's nothing at all! Mate in some countries that's a pricey subscription for a streaming service nevermind a firefox addon.

Why has it suddenly become this? Despite the fact a lot more of the recent work on it has been done by an LLM so doesn't that make it require less work? More over why not use the same popup notification to make a call for more people to help share the development load? If you're only 1 person making this (false anyway since there are 3 other contributors and 2 LLMs listed as recent contributors) why not take any of these other steps before a sub model, I just cannot understand it.

As to the basic features still working, yeah they also work in all the other extensions that won't one day out of the blue ask me for money after removing options I used to have and that's the crux of the issue here not that new features are paywalled but that previously free ones I had set were.

I really wish I could offer some constructive feedback but I can't think of a way back from this, even if the sub was removed I still don't think I would consider using it or recommending it lest the rug be pulled again.

Perfect, it does the job as intended and its updated, big thanks to the author

Premium is required to receive 5 stars.

It was good while it lasted, everything gets hit by enshittification

This extension has the audacity to pay wall functionalities. Crazy dude. I can vibe code it under 15 minutes. By the way, Unhook is a good replacement!

All free features became paid features. Do not use.

All paywalled now..

Was a great extenstion but is basically useless now that most of the best features are paywalled :)

I love this extension. It works great, and it's helped me take control of my life. The free version does everything I need it to do.

why is most of the functionality paid now. why. i have relied on this extension for years and you do this. there is no reason to pay for this.

disappointing to see this go paid out of nowhere, the current features don’t justify the price tag

Edit (3-2-2026):

Unfortunately the developer has decided to double down after what I said, I do appreciate his kindness in his reply, and I think what I originally said was worded harshly, so my apologies. 3$ a month isn't the worst? But it still rubs me the wrong way to take a once free and open source project and charge a monthly premium to use it instead of a different route like a donation goal, or something of the sort. I theorized in my original review that it sounds like he's making this extension a full time endeavor, and I think this is still the wrong way to go about it and it's soured my desire to use and recommend this extension. He assumes in his reply that I want to get around the paywall? Which, unfortunately was not the point of my review, my point was about the ethics of the situation. Thankfully there are other options out there.

My original review below:

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I decided to make an account to dunk on this extension's changes in particular, that's how bad this extension has fallen from grace. I had been using this extension for about a year now and had even started verbally recommending it to people who were looking to cut back on getting too deep in wasting time on youtube, I no longer do so. Charging a monthly premium for this is genuinely bonkers, this change made it appear as though my entire youtube page was messed up until I thought half the features of the extension were half-hazardly broken. I assumed this was typical google shenanigans until I opened the control panel for this extension, and noticed a little lock icon next to a lot of the features I was using, and then I saw youtube look normal with the corrections based on the features that were locked away. I rolled my eyes before remembering about a month ago there was a popup at the top of youtube (added by this extension) mentioning that the developer will be switching to a monthly model. I rolled my eyes, and closed it without reading further but mentally noting it. Well, about 3 days ago this change took place. And he didn't lock a little bit away, not even half the features. Bro decided to lock away almost every single feature of the plugin and demand a monthly subscription for what was once free.

You gotta sign in and make an account if you want to pay the monthly premium, so I don't even know how much it is. Didn't ask for donations, have a funding goal, or even just optionally implement a subscription model for newer features or early updates. Also I'm sorry to Mosaic, but there's no way to justify this, the developers comment doesn't even make sense. This is not the only way to keep development going, and if say, idk the dev decided this extension was his full time job... He should have opted to mention so, and asked for donations and had a funding goal, not whatever this is. This is how you turn people off to anything ever made, and piss off your entire user base. So in the meantime, instead of the developers lowkey sarcastic response to one of these recent reviews instead of unhook I recommend "LockedIn" (searchable as "lockedin yt" in the search bar made by Kartik (Mozilla doesn't allow links) instead of Unhook (which unfortunately hasn't been updated in 2 years). As silly as it sounds, I haven't been able to find many other extensions out there that fulfill this niche so if anyone else has any good recommendations, you should definitely put them in the reviews here. As for feedback to the developer? I hope you consider donation based funding goals and rollback this weird update you've pushed out. I hope this flood of recent negative reviews pushes you in a good direction. If you decide to roll back this update, and do ask for donations I'd gladly consider supporting you instead of you deciding to pull a fast one like this. Also, if you consider responding I have notifications on, I'd consider coming back to this plugin if you do rollback these changes and consider my advice.

This used to be a great open source addon for removing clutter from Youtube (not just recommendations).

However, the developer has recently disabled almost every feature in the addon (except the ability to remove recommendations and disable shorts), requiring you to pay to restore the majority of the functionality. In addition to that, the addon now not only collects data on you, but the author has recently been committing a bunch of LLM generated code to the repository. I would stay away!

If you just care about removing recommendations, this might still be an option for you (although I would recommend uninstalling it). But for decluttering the Youtube UI, you can do what I did and instead use YouTube Redux, another addon, which is still open source and free as in beer. In fact I actually like that one a lot better, because it does an even more complete job of fixing the YouTube UI.

YouTube Redux doesn't actually remove recommendations or disable autoplay, so you'll still have to find other ways to accomplish that if you want to. I actually found the recommendations that YouTube Redux shows to be so unobtrusive that I didn't even look for ways to disable them, and autoplay can be disabled by other means (for example, if you don't want to sign into Youtube, there's a reddit post you can find of a single line you can add to your uBlock Origin filters that blocks the autoplay Javascript, and there are other addons that accomplish the same).

Stop asking me for new permissions and filling up my YouTube feed with your huge red icon. Wtf? Uninstalled. Better addons out there

Come on, people. This is not "PURE GREED!" as one review said. While it's unfortunate that some features are now premium, it's apparently the only way to keep development going. As the developer said on the Google Chrome extensions page: "I'm one person maintaining this, and the options are basically: charge for some features, run ads, or stop working on it. I'm going with the first one. Core features will stay free, open to feedback on github."

Core features that were free for years are now locked behind a paywall. It was good while it lasted, I suppose.

many features that were free are now premium

to change once free features to premium ones is really a dick move.
i discovered it just a few days ago and was very happy...