Mothball
Put something away
Save one page and see where it lands. It's free to try, there's nothing to pay for, and you connect the Google Drive you already have. If you don't like it, you've lost a minute and gained a file.
Open MothballThe internet rots. Your files don't.
Mothball strips the ads from any web page and saves a clean, permanent copy into your own Google Drive. Then it's just a file: searchable, readable on any device, and still there long after the original link is dead.
First
Send it a page
Click the browser extension, tap Share on your phone, or paste a link into Mothball.
Then
It cleans the page
Ads, trackers and popups come out. Text and images stay. When in doubt it keeps things, so some sites leave a tail of links behind.
Finally
It lands in your Drive
As a Google Doc, a Markdown file, or offline HTML. In your Drive, under your account.
A reading list you can't be locked out of
Read-it-later services keep your saves on their servers, under their terms. When one shuts down, so does your library. Mothball puts the copy somewhere you already own.
Save from anywhere
One click from the desktop extension. On an Android phone, tap Share from Chrome, Reddit, Substack or anywhere else you read, and pick Mothball. On any device, you can paste a link into Mothball itself.
iPhone and iPad aren't supported yet — Safari doesn't let web apps receive shares.
Articles, blog posts, newsletters and PDFs all work.
Real documents, not links
A bookmark is a promise that someone else will keep a page online. Mothball saves the page itself — a formatted Google Doc that holds the text and the photos, so it still reads properly years after the original comes down. Markdown and HTML are there too if you want something plainer, though those keep the words and point at the images rather than storing them.
Paste a PDF and Mothball keeps the original untouched and adds a readable copy you can search and skim. Both are selected for you; turn either off if you only want one.
Findable later
Because your saves are ordinary files in Drive, Drive's own search reads them. No separate app to open, no second search box to learn, nothing to export if you change your mind.
Yours to leave
Stop using Mothball tomorrow and nothing happens to your archive. The files are already where you keep everything else, in formats that any program can open.
Mothball can't read your Drive
Most apps that touch Google Drive ask for drive — permission to view and edit everything in your storage. Mothball asks for drive.file instead: the folder you choose, and the files it creates. Nothing else.
No access by default
Until you hand Mothball a specific folder, it can't list, search or open anything in your Drive. Your documents, spreadsheets and photos stay invisible to it.
Only the folder you pick
Choosing a destination happens inside Google's own folder picker. Mothball never sees the folders you don't select.
No reading history
Mothball keeps your settings and whether you've paid. It doesn't keep what you saved, when, or where from — that exists only in your Drive.
Pay once, or don't pay at all
No subscription. It would be strange to bill you monthly for files you already own.
Free
$0Everything you need to build an archive.
- Unlimited saves, no monthly cap
- Saves to your Mothball folder in Drive
- One format per save: Google Doc, Markdown or HTML
- Keep the original PDF alongside the readable copy
- Browser extension and mobile share
- See the cleaned page before it saves
Pro
$19One payment. Yours for good, including updates.
- Save to any folder in your Drive, and create new ones
- Save several formats at once
- Your own tags on every save
- Skip the preview and save in one tap
- Batch saving: paste a list of links, or import your bookmarks
Early days
Mothball is new, and it's one person building it. It works, it's being actively developed, and more is on the way.
If something breaks, or there's a feature you wish it had, write to support@mothballed.app. At this stage every message gets read, and the suggestions tend to become the next thing I build.
Questions
Do I need a Google account?
Yes. Mothball saves into Google Drive, so you need a Google account and you'll be asked to connect it the first time you save. There's no separate Mothball account on top of that.
How is this different from Google's own Save to Google Drive extension?
Google's extension captures the page as it stands. Depending on your settings you get a screenshot, the raw HTML source, an MHTML archive, or a Google Doc conversion — in each case with the ads, navigation and cookie banners still in it. A screenshot isn't searchable text, and raw source is hard to read. In practice it often ignores the format you chose and hands you a screenshot regardless.
Mothball is the result of going back to that extension for years, hoping it had improved, and eventually giving up and building the thing it never quite did: the article itself, as text and images you can read and search. It also takes pasted links and shares from your phone, not just the tab you're currently looking at.
Isn't the Google Drive app enough?
Drive stores files you give it. It doesn't turn a web page into one, and nothing Google ships does that part well — which is the gap Mothball was built to fill. Mothball handles the conversion and then hands the result to Drive, which is why your saves end up as ordinary files you can open, search and share without Mothball being involved at all.
My save has a pile of links at the end. Why?
Mothball errs toward keeping things. Deciding what's article and what's furniture is guesswork, and a tool that guesses aggressively will sometimes drop a pull quote or a closing paragraph without telling you — which you won't notice until you go looking for it. Leftover links at the end are visible and harmless; silently missing text isn't.
So some sites leave a tail behind. The article arrives whole, and you can delete the rest in Drive if it bothers you.
Mothball couldn't read a page at all. What happened?
Some pages have no article in them to find. Video pages, image galleries, apps, anything built entirely in JavaScript, and pages behind a login all give Mothball nothing to work with, and it will either save very little or tell you it couldn't.
This is a limit of reading a page from the outside rather than a bug, and every tool of this kind shares it. When it happens, the save is worth deleting rather than keeping — an almost-empty file in your archive is worse than no file.
What happens to my files if Mothball shuts down?
Nothing. They're already in your Drive as Google Docs, Markdown or HTML files. You can open, move, share and search them without Mothball ever being involved again.
Why did saving a PDF give me two files?
Because throwing away the original would be the wrong thing for an archive to do. Mothball selects both for you: the PDF exactly as it was, and a cleaned-up copy that's easier to read and that Drive can search. Deselect either one before saving if you'd rather have just the one. Keeping the original doesn't count against your one-format-per-save on the free plan.
Does it work on paywalled articles?
Mothball saves what your browser can already see. If you're signed in to a publication and can read the article, the extension can save it. It isn't a way around a paywall.
How much Drive storage does a save use?
Not much. The text and formatting of a Google Doc don't count against your Drive quota at all — only the images inside it do, so a photo-heavy article costs more than a plain one. Most saves land well under a megabyte.
Is there an Android or iPhone app?
Mothball installs to your home screen from the browser, and then appears in the Share sheet like any other app. There's nothing to download from an app store.