For about fourteen months, I paid for a browser subscription specifically because it came with built-in ad blocking that the developer claimed was immune to detection. It cost me €4.99 a month. The ad blocking worked well on most sites and passably on YouTube until it didn’t. Then the developer pushed an update that broke YouTube ad blocking while they “investigated the issue,” posted an update in their Discord three weeks later saying it was a known problem with no timeline for a fix, and I canceled the subscription the same afternoon.
The thing I should have checked before paying for anything: there are free options that do this better. Finding a genuinely useful ad blocker free option isn’t about finding something cheap – it’s about finding something that’s maintained properly and doesn’t trade your browsing data for the privilege of blocking someone else’s ads.
After canceling that subscription I tried Stands, which positions itself as the solid ad blocker for chrome extension that doesn’t log what you do or where you go. Six months later I still use it daily and I’m paying nothing.
That comparison stuck with me enough to write about it.
What “Free” Actually Means in This Category
Free browser extensions exist on a spectrum.
The Acceptable Ads Model
At one end, you have extensions that are free because they’re funded by the acceptable ads program – advertisers pay to have their ads whitelisted, users get partial blocking, the extension company takes a cut. This is AdBlock Plus’s model. You’re not fully blocking ads; you’re blocking ads from companies that didn’t pay for an exemption. It’s a legitimate business model, but it’s worth knowing about before you install.
The Data Collection Model
In the middle, you have extensions that are free because they’re collecting behavioral data – what you browse, what you click, how long you spend on different sites – and using that to generate revenue through analytics or targeted advertising partnerships. The product is free because you’re the product. This is common enough that checking the privacy policy before installing anything has become reflex for me.
The Genuinely Free Model
At the other end, you have extensions that are genuinely free, funded through other means – donations, paid tiers for additional features, or company backing – without monetizing user data or running acceptable ads programs. Stands falls here. The core blocking is free, it doesn’t log browsing behavior, and there’s no whitelist that advertisers can buy into.
The difference matters more the longer you use something.
Six Months of Daily Use: What I Actually Track
I keep rough mental notes on how often my ad blocking setup causes me friction. It’s not scientific, but it tells me whether something is working.
The Paid Browser Subscription
With the paid browser subscription: roughly three problems per week. Some weeks more. Mostly YouTube-related, occasionally a site where the blocking was too aggressive and broke the layout.
Stands
With Stands across the same browsing patterns: maybe two problems per month. Usually a page refresh resolves it. Once I needed to temporarily whitelist a site because the blocking was interfering with a login flow, which took thirty seconds to fix and thirty seconds to reverse.
The delta between those two numbers is why I’m no longer paying €4.99 a month for something.
The Chrome-Specific Angle
Chrome’s relationship with ad blocking got complicated in 2024 when Google pushed the Manifest V3 transition, which changed the API that extensions can use for web request filtering. Extensions built on Manifest V2 – the older, more powerful API – were supposed to be phased out. In practice the transition has been slower than announced, and the full implications for ad blocking are still playing out.
The short version: MV3 restricts some of the techniques that powerful blockers have historically used, which is why you may have seen coverage about uBlock Origin releasing a “Lite” version with reduced capabilities. Extensions built to work within MV3 constraints tend to have slightly different performance characteristics than MV2 extensions.
Stands has navigated this without a significant drop in blocking performance in my experience, which suggests they’ve done the architectural work to keep things functional under the new rules. That’s not a given – some extensions handled this badly.
What I’d Tell Someone Switching From a Paid Solution
The honest answer is: test it yourself for two weeks before making any decisions.
How to Run the Comparison
Install Stands alongside whatever you’re currently using – you can run it disabled and enable it when you want to compare. Use YouTube for a week. Visit the sites you normally visit. Note how often something breaks or requires attention.
If the experience is comparable or better, you’ve just freed up whatever you were paying monthly. If it’s worse in ways that matter to you, you have real information rather than a review article’s opinion.
For me the comparison wasn’t close. Six months in, I don’t think about it.
That’s the benchmark everything else gets measured against.
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