hushbug.dev

What It Is

Hushbug is a Chrome extension for developers, positioned as a “silent QA engineer.” It runs passively while you browse and debug pages, surfaces issues with a colored badge, and shows the issue list, context, stack traces, and timestamps in a sidebar. Its core value is that it requires no SDK, no configuration, and no account for the free tier—you can start capturing browser-side issues as soon as it is installed.

Core Capabilities

Its features cover 10 detectors across 6 categories: console errors, uncaught exceptions, and unhandled Promise rejections; failed fetch/XHR requests, HTTP 4xx/5xx responses, and slow requests; CLS, memory growth, and deprecated browser APIs; images missing alt text, forms missing labels, missing ARIA attributes, and WCAG AA contrast issues; mixed content and missing security headers such as CSP/HSTS/X-Frame-Options; and layout shifts caused by images, fonts, dynamic content, and CSS animations. The page states that its detection pipeline consists of the page JS context, a content script, a service worker, and a Preact sidebar, with local deduplication and storage in chrome.storage.

Pricing and Privacy

The free tier includes ConsoleError and NetworkFailure, with support for the badge, sidebar, dismissing issues, and clipboard export. Pro costs $7/month or $67/year and unlocks all detectors, suppression rules, custom thresholds, baseline snapshots, regression diffs, and persistent history. Privacy is a highlight: during normal operation it makes no network requests, has no analytics, no telemetry, and no remote server. The only network call is a one-time license check via Stripe.

Pros and Cons

The strengths are that it is extremely quick to get started, requires relatively few permissions, and keeps data local. It is a good fit for individual developers who want to automatically aggregate issues that are easy to miss in browser DevTools. The drawbacks are that, based on the available text, it is currently only presented as a Chrome extension, with no CLI, CI, team reporting, issue tracker, or alerting integrations; the free tier is fairly basic; and its open-source license, support channels, and enterprise capabilities are not disclosed.

Who It’s For and Access From China

Hushbug is suitable for frontend developers, small teams, and privacy-conscious web projects, especially for local development, manual QA, and page regression checks. Access from China cannot be confirmed from the text alone; Chrome Web Store access and Stripe payments may be unreliable in mainland China. If access or payment is limited, alternatives such as Chrome DevTools, Lighthouse, axe DevTools, Sentry, and LogRocket may be worth considering.