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  • Products
    Kolkata Gold PriceWeb app · Recorded 18K, 22K and 24K gold rates for Kolkata, in English and Bengali.
  • FeedKeeperBrowser extension · Hides the YouTube videos you don't want. Keeps the ones you came for.
  • Blog
    A Napoleonic cipher and Grad's conjecture: what AI actually didGPT-6 Astra helped decode an 1809 cipher letter to General Marmont and find counterexamples to Grad's 1967 plasma conjecture. What happened, and what it means.
  • How to stop AI-built websites looking the sameWhy sites built by AI coding agents look alike, and the tools that help: Hallmark, Impeccable, the 21st.dev MCP, Archify for diagrams, and asking for variants.
  • FeedKeeper: a YouTube feed filter that works by categoryWhy we built FeedKeeper, a Chrome extension that hides the kinds of YouTube videos you choose from your home feed and Up next, and how its three modes work.
  • Free AI tools worth trying: job search, video, browsing and moreEight open-source AI tools from this month's GitHub trends, checked against their own docs: what each does, what it costs, how to install it, and the catch.
  • Gemini 4 Argon vs GPT-6.1 Sol vs Claude Sonnet 5.5Three frontier models launched in three days. Prices, limits, benchmarks, cost per task and availability for Gemini 4 Argon, GPT-6.1 Sol and Claude Sonnet 5.5.
  • Installing Claude Code skills and MCP servers safely: a checklistAgent skills and MCP servers run with your permissions. Real incidents, what to check before you install one, and how to limit what it can reach.
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software studio · product collective

Small tools, made well.

ByteShades is an independent software studio. We build browser extensions, Mac apps, developer tools and everyday utilities. Some are open source, some you pay for once, all of them are meant to be useful.

See the products GitHub
Products
1 live · 1 in beta
last release
FeedKeeper 1.1.0 ·
Kolkata
IST
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01products

Things we make

Every product is built and maintained by the same two people.

Type
Pricing

2 products

  • Live

    Kolkata Gold Price by ByteShades

    Recorded 18K, 22K and 24K gold rates for Kolkata, in English and Bengali.

    • Web
    Free
  • v1.1.0Beta

    FeedKeeper by ByteShades

    Hides the YouTube videos you don't want. Keeps the ones you came for.

    • Chrome
    Freemium

02the mark

One byte, many shades.

The logo is a small diagram of how ByteShades works.

  1. 01 · The byte

    The B is the studio.

    Same indigo, same shape, on every product we ship. In ASCII, B is 0x42: one byte, 0100 0010.

  2. 02 · The shade

    The stroke beside it is the shade.

    Its sweeping curves form the S beside the B. It is the part that changes from product to product.

  3. 03 · Many shades

    Every product is its own shade.

    Kolkata Gold Price is gold and FeedKeeper is red. Each one is a different shade of the same studio.

03pricing

No surprise subscriptions.

Each product states its model up front, on its card and its page.

Open source
The code is public. Use it, fork it, send a pull request.
One-time licence
One price, yours to keep. Updates within the major version are free.
Freemium
The core is free forever. Pro adds the heavy features and keeps the servers running.
Free
Free to use. Some are ad-supported, and we say so on the product page.

04changelog

Recently shipped.

Real versions, real dates, straight from each product's release history.

Full changelogRSS feed

~/byteshades — changelog

~/byteshades $ byteshades changelog --limit 5

  1. FeedKeeper1.1.0Scans cost about half as much and decide more videos correctly; Shorts are no longer sent to the AI.
  2. FeedKeeper1.0.0First stable release: home feed and Up next filtering, three modes, Block Shorts and custom categories.
  3. FeedKeeper0.3.0Block Shorts: one switch hides every Short on YouTube, with no AI calls.
  4. FeedKeeper0.2.0Allow-only mode, per-video Why? inspection, filter profiles and focus sessions.
  5. FeedKeeper0.1.0First public release: classify home-feed videos into 19 categories and preview, hide or remove them.

~/byteshades $

05blog

From the blog

AI news worth reading, tools we like, and how our products work under the hood.

All posts

06studio

Two people, one studio.

ByteShades makes small tools and keeps them working. Each one does a single job, states its price before you install it, and is maintained by the two people who built it. We would rather look after a few tools for years than launch many and leave them.

  • Portrait of Soumen Samanta

    Soumen Samanta

    Co-Founder & CEO

    Full-stack developer who builds web apps and APIs with React, Next.js, Node.js, PostgreSQL and AWS.

    Soumen on LinkedIn
  • Portrait of Souvik Samanta

    Souvik Samanta

    Co-Founder & CTO

    Software developer who builds LLM-powered web, Android and backend apps, with a background in NLP.

    Souvik on LinkedIn

07faq

Questions, answered.

What is ByteShades?

ByteShades is an independent software studio that builds and maintains small tools: browser extensions, Mac apps, developer tools and everyday utilities. It is based in Kolkata, India, and every product carries the studio's name, as in "FeedKeeper by ByteShades".

Who makes ByteShades products?

ByteShades products are built and maintained by its two co-founders: Soumen Samanta (CEO) and Souvik Samanta (CTO).

Are ByteShades products free?

Some are, and each product page states its price model. Kolkata Gold Price is free to use. FeedKeeper is freemium: free to use, with an optional paid tier. There are no surprise subscriptions: anything paid says so before you install it.

Which ByteShades products are open source?

None of the published products are open source at the moment. When one is, it will be listed on this page with its repository, and the studio's public code lives at https://github.com/Byteshades.

Does ByteShades collect my data?

byteshades.com sets no cookies and runs no analytics. For the products: Kolkata Gold Price needs no account or personal details. Its privacy policy says Google Analytics and Google AdSense are planned, and that they may use cookies once enabled. FeedKeeper has no server and no analytics. Video titles, channel names and, unless you turn it off, descriptions and tags go to OpenRouter with your own API key; nothing about you, such as watch history or cookies, is sent.

How do I report a bug or request a feature?

Email contact@byteshades.com with the product name, what you expected and what happened.

08contact

Got an idea for a small tool

Bug reports, feature requests or a tool you wish existed: write to us at contact@byteshades.com.

Email us Follow on GitHub