What's always free
Before listing what Pro adds, it's worth being clear about what stays free in the standard plan (no time limit) — because there's a lot of it:
- Clock, date, focus input, and the full dashboard layout
- Command palette with tabs, bookmarks, history, and search
- Up to 3 custom plugins (fetch or scrape mode)
- All built-in plugins (Hacker News, Crypto, Reddit, Gmail, GitHub, Calendar, Spotify, Todoist, AWS, YouTube)
- Habits tracker with full history
- Todo list and Pomodoro timer
- Snippets and URL aliases (up to 20 each)
- All 9 background sources including Unsplash and GIPHY
- Quick links, analog/digital clock modes, full theme customization
- All privacy settings — everything runs on-device regardless of tier
The free tier is not a teaser. It's a complete, useful product. Pro is an optional upgrade for users who hit the limits of that product.
Pro: Unlimited custom plugins
The free tier supports 3 custom plugins. Pro removes this limit entirely. If you're using Pinodock as an engineering dashboard, a trading terminal, or a personal command center pulling from a dozen internal APIs, you need as many plugins as your workflow requires — not a number chosen for upsell friction.
Unlimited plugins also includes all field-level features: sparkline charts, threshold colors, click-through URL fields, and badge count on the extension icon. These work on the free tier too (up to your plugin limit), but power users building deep integrations will want the full slate.
Pro: Relay mode for private APIs
Relay mode lets you connect to APIs that can't be called directly from the browser — because they block CORS, require server-side credentials, or involve secrets you don't want in browser storage. You host a small relay function (10–20 lines of Vercel, Cloudflare Workers, or AWS Lambda code), and Pinodock routes through it securely.
This is a Pro feature because it requires coordination between your Pinodock installation and infrastructure you control. Free plugins use direct fetch — no server, no setup. Relay is for users with internal tooling, private APIs, or the technical appetite to build a bridge.
Real-world relay use cases Pro users have built:
- Stripe MRR via relay (Stripe API key stays on the server)
- PagerDuty incident count (their API doesn't allow CORS)
- Linear sprint metrics with custom aggregation in the relay function
- Notion database queries (Notion's API blocks CORS direct calls)
- Internal company dashboards from authenticated REST APIs
Pro: Advanced automations
Pinodock's automation system lets you create trigger → action rules that run in the background. Pro unlocks the full automation feature set:
- Time-based triggers — open a URL or run a command at a specific time daily
- Query triggers — trigger an action when a search matches a pattern
- Chained automations — multiple actions per trigger
- External webhooks — trigger automations from outside the browser (CI pipeline notification, deployment hook)
Free users get basic automations (up to 3, time-based only). Pro lifts these limits and adds query triggers and external webhook support.
Pro: AI features
Pinodock's command palette integrates with on-device AI (Gemini Nano, when available) for free — short queries, quick lookups, math, and text transformation without any API cost. Pro adds cloud AI escalation:
- Longer conversations — multi-turn threads that persist across new tabs
- Richer context — AI that sees your open tabs, focus input, and current tasks as context
- AI-powered snippet generation — describe what you need and generate the snippet text automatically
- Summarization — summarize a page or clipboard contents directly from the palette
Cloud AI features require Anthropic API usage, which is why they're Pro-only — the cost is real even though the compute is invisible to you.
Pro: Priority support
Free users get community support via the support page and email. Pro users get direct priority email support with a response SLA. For users who have integrated Pinodock deeply into their workflow — where a broken plugin or a missing feature is a genuine productivity loss — priority support is worth it on its own.
Pro: Early access
New features land for Pro users first. Not as a tease — as a practical reality: Pro users tend to be power users who can give useful feedback before something ships broadly. When relay mode was built, Pro users tested it across dozens of different API configurations before it landed in the docs. That feedback loop makes the feature better for everyone.
The honest version of the pitch
Pinodock Pro is not for everyone. If you use Pinodock as a beautiful new tab with a clock, focus input, and a couple of built-in plugins, you don't need Pro and you never will. The free tier exists precisely so that the majority of users never have to think about a subscription.
Pro is for the user who has replaced their terminal with Pinodock plugins, who runs three relay integrations, who uses automations to pre-load their morning workflow, and who wants AI that knows what they're working on. If that's you, Pro pays for itself in the first week.