Built by one person.
Minibase is a Chrome extension that turns any webpage into clean Markdown in one click. It was built by Jean-Sébastien Wallez, a French product engineer in Paris, to solve his own problem feeding web content to Claude and Obsidian.
Jean-Sébastien Wallez
Founder & product engineer · Paris, France
French entrepreneur and product engineer. I've been shipping web and mobile apps for over a decade. Minibase is the tool I use every day for my own research and knowledge management, shipped publicly so you can use it too.
Why Minibase exists
In 2025, I was drowning in browser tabs. YouTube lectures I wanted to reference, Reddit threads with exactly the answer I needed, arXiv papers I'd bookmarked but never read. All of it invisible to the AI tools I was using for research.
Existing web clippers produced messy Markdown — cookie-banner noise, nav chrome, broken code blocks. Fine for humans; terrible for Claude or ChatGPT as context. I wanted Markdown that looked hand-written, one click away from any page.
How Minibase is built
- ▸ AI-first extraction. Minibase uses Google Gemini with 300+ site-specific prompts to turn messy HTML into structured Markdown. The extension captures the page, the API runs it through the right prompt for that site, you get clean output.
- ▸ Privacy-first. Page content is sent to Minibase's API, processed, and returned. It's never stored server-side beyond the duration of a request. Your clipped content lives on your device — or, if you install Minibase Vault (Mac or Windows), in a local folder you own.
- ▸ Local-first storage. Minibase Vault (Mac or Windows) writes every clip to a local
Minibase Vaultfolder in your Documents, with no cloud dependency. Open the folder as an Obsidian vault, grep it withripgrep, or let Claude read it via MCP. - ▸ Built for AI workflows. Minibase's output is tuned for LLM context windows — heading structure preserved, tables as Markdown, no layout cruft. It's what I use myself to feed Claude and ChatGPT every day.
