Reviews & Comments of BeeLine Reader chrome extension

I used to really love this plug in because it helped me read with ease, but it no longer works with Google Docs and PDFs opening in Chrome. So disappointing, and I wish I would have known that before paying for a monthly subscription.

I like the idea but as a student, I cannot pay this much. There is an education discount but i assume that's for schools to buy for their students? Isn't there a possibility for me to get a discount as an individual student ?

Does not work consistently & pops up on every page. If you turn auto off, it pops up to tell you that you have auto turned off.

Creative apps

Popups?? Question : Why is there a pop up from this app persistently? I just want it to shut the heck up and do its job in the background: i don't care about all the notifications and popups from it, it's worse than adware.

Used to love this app, now I really hate it because there's no customer service line and they wrongfully charged me $22.00. It's unclear how I can even change my subscription settings, this is a joke. DO NOT INSTALL.

I have ADHD and LOVE beeline when it works - but it often doesn't on google docs where I mainly work :/

I've played with this a bit and it's a nice idea, but the color options and formatting are too limited and it was a lot of trial and error to get it to work. I wasn't a big fan of the fact that the extremely limited (five reads a day) free trial started before I even got the app to work, but I was decided on uninstalling it before I hit my limit.

For reading it was fine - but the process of installing and getting it working was hard - it is unclear how to get it "registered" and there is no option on their webpage to check to see if you have an account and if it is being charged. I distrust a company that makes it this hard to tell if you are paying for something. I also agree with the others here that this should be a one time payment for a version, not a monthly subscription.

There is no mention that the application is only free for a trial on the chrome web store. It's a super useful to help read text but is sad is only able to be used by people with money to spare for this.

Works good on native text and helps me read more, but doesn't work at all in Google Docs (or only on the comments, for some reason.) Hope that this can be resolved

It helped me so much with actually comprehending what I read, it's made classwork and free writing with adhd quite a bit easier! Highly recommend for anyone else who has trouble keeping their eyes on the page.

Restricts usage in free mode. Looks nice and works with my auto copy extension. No image options.. they are off. I'm not really into the color variating, which they seem to think is the selling point.

I've been using BeeLine for just about a week or so now, and have noticed a difference in the way I read. Not only am I faster, but I can keep my attention longer. Highly recommended!

"Skip auto-coloring on all sites" is locked from the get go. Was never able to get it work once on any site no matter which setting I attempted to change.

BEWARE USERS! This is a scam.

Without Beeline I would have had a harder time trying to read the infamous Does Bruno Mars is Gay article. The customizablity is also an added bonus :)

It useful at times, but I have to recover my license constantly. Also, I wish it wasn't defaulted on every website.

eh. used to be good, when it was free (years ago). Now it's just so-so.

Right so, the TL;DR, don't use this extension. 0/10 It looks like it could be amazing, but I enabled and immediately removed. As soon as I turned it on in my browser there was a pop-up notifying me this is a paid extension. If this was made obvious from the Chrome Web Store, I couldn't find it. Bad form. I'll admit upfront that I don't pay for SAAS (software as a service). If I can't pay one time and own it the company has a bad or unsustainable business model. (Is your software good enough to have a proper price tag that allows you to continue development and pay your employees a living wage or not?) Over the lifetime of the subscription SAAS services cost users many many times what a one-time purchase would, this is exploitative without an alternate payment method. (I'm not saying all SAAS is a problem -it basically is- BUT I will purchase SAAS extensions/tools when they have one-time purchase option). My really *really* big issue is that this extension/app requires separate subscriptions per device and per browser. How hilarious and embarrassing. Please don't give these people your money.

I wasn't really 'taken' with the ideology (I didn't really believe it). Then I used it and now I can't go back. I really can read even the simplest of pages with far more efficiency.

i loved this extension some years ago. the color changing is so immensely helpful for someone like myself with processing issues. they've decided to lock this utility for neurodivergent and disabled people behind a paywall, where they promise new features, and have yet to fix the bugs or implement QOL changes that have been asked for since the beginning. 0/10 not worth it. if speed reading is your goal, there are monumentally superior extensions that do their job with less bloat and less fuss. if you're a person with processing issues and no spare cash for a new monthly expense, you're out of luck

Great for my tired eyes!

Such a helpful and genius focusing tool for people who have a hard time reading, but making this a paid extension ruins the entire point of the extension. The devs deserve to be paid, for sure, but I don't think this is the way to get money for their creation. I wish the extension worked on more pages and was easier to toggle. 2 dollars a month might be worth if if you read on a monitor for a living but the average consumer who just needs some help is seldom going to be willing to pay for this...

This extension could have been helpful for so many people with learning disabilities, but to lock that behind a paywall is incredibly ableist.

I (would) use this for school work. Scratch that I would ONLY use this for school work. I also only view my school work using google apps like docs and in pdf documents. You could imagine what would've happened when I found that I could use the free mode indefinitely, but not be able to read pdf's with the extension because there IS A SEPARATE plugin/extension that I have to buy. And then I read the comments for this and saw someone suggest a text reader instead. They aren't wrong.

While this is very useful, I feel that a monthly subscription for full access is exploitative of people with dyslexia or who otherwise have difficulty reading text on a screen. I used this extension a few years ago and it didn't have a paid version at all, so I don't understand why it has to have one now. Also, it takes way too long to load.

I love Beeline Reader. I don't use focus mode or Dyslexic font. I just active in Clean mode, bright colors, and only on the sites I want to use it on. Someone else said you couldn't activate on only the page you wanted but that's incorrect. Go to settings and UNcheck "enable auto-color" I often read the same line over and over as my eyes get lost in the page. I'm also using it on iPad to read kindle books. Game changer.

The program was super helpful and worked really well, but it's really frustrating to charge as much as they do. I can understand needing income, and would even understand a one time fee to use it, but requiring $2/month is absurd. I don't have much money to spare, and putting a tool which helps with disabilities behind a $24/year paywall, especially one which just changes the color of words, is greedy and unfair

Great. However, some website, such as www.scmp.com, does not work, and it is not very easy to turn on and off the auto color function.

clean mode and focus mode have always been buggy. 1) alt+c doesn't work. clean mode has to be turned on via menu. But then it can't be turned off at all, the only way left is to refresh the page and lost the coloring along with it. 2) focus mode sub-menu just flashes when clicked on and in menu it's always shown as "off".

The concept seems interesting, but apparently there's no way to simply turn the coloring on to read one article. You have to enable "auto color" which colors *all* pages. It's all or nothing apparently. This is annoying and bad design.

i was using this for years when it just came out, and as a dyslexic kid i loved it, but their moneygrab has been absolutely shameful and exclusionary for a learning aid. this extension truly is a learning aid and not a luxary item and asking 2 dollars a month (what i spend on half of my food in a day, i am on foodstamps) is absolute greed. dont give this extension more money for restricting access to a tool that can help kids learn and costs absolutely nothing in physical cost. dont get me wrong i think devs should get fairly paid but this is absurd. beeline reader is one piece of coding that was made years ago and hardly changed, that money i would be paying to use this wouldnt be paying for work, just for the dev's greed

it doesn't work on the website i downloaded it to use on. literally none of the pages on the entire website would load the beeline text, regardless of how much or little text is on the page. the website is a very simple HTML website, i'm not sure why the plug-in would have so much trouble with it. the website is politically-oriented so i'm suspicious maybe they just have it blacklisted.

When this extension works it is great, however, it has a lot of glitches and scenarios where is doesn't work for example with pdfs, on certain websites (usually where there is a lot of text or with scientific journals). Please also explain why another fee is charged for pdfs when access to the software has already been paid for - this seems unreasonable.

Fails to color most pages that I've tried thus far. The "Clean Mode" completely breaks the page due to a popup asking how I use BeeLine.

Slowww

it was good to read with, however the extension will not open meaning that I cannot toggle anything or turn it off when I need to.

really helpful to read without being distracted. one pro TIP for using it: use in CLEAN MODE with FULL SCREEN to maximize to your focus.

great app for students and bus-readers alike

This extension is but a free trial and is not easily operated if you want a better tool use text to speech.

It helps, not sure how, but having to install plugins and buy full versions make me far less fond of the extension. Also super annoying for pdf because I am almost exclusively reading pdfs and need the plugin for it!

So, great idea for trying to help people read faster. I like the coloring that it does when I am reading articles. I would say it "does work" to improve reading a "little" faster. Not sure the research behind it, wish they would put the research on their website. Issues -------- Need to have whitelist instead of blacklist - This plugin is gonna load on every single website. But you really only need it on article/news site. Any other website isn't needed and is actually distracting and can make words not visible, and you will spend much time blacklisting each site you visit. Not a plugin suitable for subscription. Thats a big money grab by the developers. Even though it seems little, 1.99 a month is too much for this. Maybe a one-time fee of 5-10 dollars would be okay if the plugin is actually usable and helpful to you. I really want it to just work when I read articles not every website, so not really taking a pain away easily. The setting area of the plugin - Every time you want to disable on a webpage you have to go to the 2nd page of the plugin. Very inefficient and ugly plugin design. The website is terrible, doesn't explain anything about the plugin. I have uninstalled this plugin and do not recommend until they enhance it a lot, especially the Pro version.

Please remember my last chosen theme I don't want to click on it every time just to change theme

Arabic language is not supported? letters became separated after BeeLine enabled.. like this>> ب س م ا ل ل ه it should be like this>> بسم الله thanks a lot for helping.

Ads and a paid "pro" feature is a turn off. It cleans up webpages just like 10 others extensions that don't have ads or a paid "pro" feature.

This extension has helped me so much for a long time, it really will help many others in the future. The reason I'm giving it 4 stars instead of 5 is the addition of a pro feature. This extension has helped me because I am disabled, I have learning disabilities that make reading difficult and this helped a lot. If it were a one time charge of, say 10-20$ I would be a lot more comfortable paying for this. This is a great extension that I'm sure others will get great use out of.

I'm dyslexic and this extension has saved my metaphorical donkey for MONTHS. It's such a big part of my life now that I've stopped reading larger articles and posts on my phone.I'll wait so I can come to the computer and read it with Beeline. I cannot wait for an app to come out for the android! Y'all are doing such an amazing job and I always recommend you to friends for similar reasons, eye strain, and even friends without reading difficulties. Also thank you for making a free version! It makes it much more accessible to a lot of people.

Happen to come across this during the much dreaded finals week and it made a huge difference for me. I ended up getting the paid version and it was totally worth it Too bad that I didn't see the student pass available for free with an .edu email Haha Oh well :)

Does not work well with Chegg online books.

The colour gradient really helps in reading line by line. If only there was a one-time payment, I'd gladly pay in full. :)

helpful!

I initially found this a very helpful tool, but it doesn't take long to realize its limitations. 1. Free account allows you to "activate" the tool 5 times daily. Normally that would be good enough for me, except that switching it ON/OFF isn't that easy; if you forget to switch it OFF, then next thing you know you've used up all 5 times because Beeline decides to activate on the pages you don't need activated. 2. I've e-mailed their support twice for different reasons, the second time was a week ago now. I haven't heard anything back. Which is kinda ridiculous given I've paid for the PDF version and one of my e-mail was to inquire about that. 3. Sure the idea behind this tool is innovative, and it makes reading a lot easier for someone like me. A LOT of people with learning disability can really benefit from this tool, but sadly the cost is prohibitory, especially given the level of service. I have distaste for all who aims to profit from those in need. 4. Beeline PDF Viewer--- this was a huge disappointment. This extension changes the format of the PDF document in such a way that text selection will no longer be possible. What this means is that you can no longer highlight/underline the texts, and same with word-search (no longer OCR'd). To me this is the deal-breaker.

i love this ....its rely good. i would have given it 5 stars but it seems i cannot get to read pdfs from this side of the world (africa) because its stated price is unavailable... hope it wil be altered to help

It doesn't colour all text on facebook. It only colours the first part of a status or comment. When I click "see more" to read the rest of the text, ALL of the text is coloured to match the last line of the truncated text. So if the last line of status is red, then the whole rest of the status will be red when I click "see more". It makes it harder to read, not easier, and so I'm going to uninstall this app promptly until this issue is resolved. Furthermore, I don't want to pay for an app that doesn't work, so the fact that it nags me is annoying. If the app worked consistently, I would be willing to pay a 1 time fee of $20. I think that the $10/ year of use ridiculous. I agree with another reviewer that it is the type of tactic shared by companies that want you to "forget" you have recurring fees.

Please make it available on Firefox and other browsers. Google is okay but there are some people who do not want to live in a Google-only world.

I remember a long time ago using this free plugin constantly, heck I'm pretty sure it even kept formatting and worked on Tumblr. I had to get a new hard drive since then, and only now went to grab it so I can read better. Not only does it reformat pages it does work on (Not Tumblr anymore), but the very first time I even tried to use it, it told me my trial ran out or something? I've had it for Seconds. The payment thing is weird and confusing. A one-time payment for bonuses like custom colors would be a lot more understandable than yearly payments and trials like how it's set up now. I miss the way I remember this plugin.

$10 a year if you want to keep using it. You've got to be kidding me. A $5 one-time charge would be a fair price. This subscription charging for software has got to stop. They're betting that people will forget about it after something better comes along and they'll just keep debiting peoples' accounts year after year like leaches.

I used to love this extension but then they added something new that made it possible for users to read 5 pages per day using this extension. I was okay with that. But then no matter what day I tried to use it on, it always said "You've used all 5 manual BeeLine activations for today" despite the fact that I hadn't used it in the last week. They have gotta work on their programming.

Helps my students with dyslexia and tracking issues immensely!

Wow quickly became my fave thing ever!

This thing is just amazing. I'm truly dumbfounded. I'm reading maybe 50% faster than I've read anything before, ever, and eyestrain I usually have when reading is gone.

it is really helpful and i appreciate the efforts of the developers sooo much, sincerely appreciate it

Sometimes it doesn't take on pages like tumblr- certain posts won't have the gradients- but otherwise it works as advertised, just a shame that I'll have to pay for it soon with a yearly rate.

I've been using this for quite some time and now i'm being forced to pay. I love the program and I know you guys could probably use some cash flow but i would much rather spend 5.99 once for an app than 10 $ a year. As it stands, once the free trial is over i'm uninstalling. Anyone know where I can get an old version of the extension? I wish I had never updated now...

The idea is absolute genius in its simplicity. I do not agree with the price scheme for something this simple, but nevertheless it is incredibly effective and is worth paying for.

BeeLine actually saves my eyes so much strain, I've always had trouble reading in long lines, so even casual Wikipedia browsing was tough for me. With BeeLine, I can read faster without difficulty, there's no fumbling around and accidentally reading the same sentence over and over. I've recommended it to everyone who complains about eye troubles. Reformatting is sometimes a pain, but I honestly couldn't care less because of how much easier it makes my life, thank you for this.

Very helpful but please add a button to turn it off and on without having to go to the extension manager in the settings menu every time you want to turn it off

I have been using BeeLine for several years now. In addition to my personal use, I used to be the Production Manager for a Television Production company and found BeeLine to be invaluable for use with our Teleprompters. All our presenters and readers were very appreciative as was I. I can’t tell you how much time we saved not having to do as many re-takes. And the quality of the recorded scripts and narrations improved noticeably right away. In addition to teleprompter use I also use it for day to day routine documents, proposals, reports and long letters. I also use Beeline just to add color to tables and lists. Making them easier on the eyes. Interestingly, referring to people who do not know about my use of BeeLine, only a very few ever tried to discern a color-code scheme. Most people just accept it as eye candy, without thinking about why it is easier to read. I've received many complements from co-workers and clients who have expressed their appreciation for making it a bit easier to read my sometimes lengthy communications. One client called me her favorite “psychedelic” writer. The Peter Max of script writers. But getting back to business. I use the BeeLine creator/reader applications for a variety of reasons and products. I highly recommend it for anyone who writes extensively. And am looking forward to forthcoming new and/or improved versions.

It works but some of the color schemes are unchoosable and the default is pretty ugly. The reformatting is really annoying and should be able to be turned on and off. I read writings on sites like live journal and the reformatting will make it so you only can read the first comment. I would like an option that just highlights every other line or a block of 2-4 lines. This is how i dealt with difficulty reading before (by just highlighting like im gonna copy it) and its less harsh on my eyes. To have it automatic would be a great option. Its already used on charts pretty often.

The page reformatting is extremely frustrating. I see that it helps some people and that's great, but it's just distracting and unhelpful for me. On some websites I've tried it on, only a small portion of the total text appears on the reformatted page. I wish the Beeline website was more forthcoming about that-- I thought that I had messed up and didn't realize it was a feature of the app until I looked at the reviews here.

im dyslexic but it dosnt seem to help me much. its a good concept and will help many people who have trouble navagating from one line to the next due to there dyslexia.

I wish I could do this to every text I need to read everywhere.

The dyslexic coloring is fabulous!! I wish I had this in High School!!

Awesome! Best of its kind!

One word. Excellent! Simply the best extension to read news articles hands down. Look forward to future enhancements.

I haven't been able to use much of it since I visit select websites, but I can see some serious potential for it in the future. One thing I'm not impressed by is that it turned Tumblr into a short RSS feed of my 10 recent dashboard posts. As I spend a LOT of time on Tumblr, which is where I actually learned about BeeLine, I hope support for this is improved, and can work for sites like Tumblr soon. Overall, excellent idea.

Excellent! Just wish there was a way to use this for Word Docs and other text outside the browser as well.

Great core feature (the reclouring of text). It needs a pause button! Beeline can mess with the display of some websites and for some reason, if I'm copying text that's been beelined it has odd breaks, which is terrible when I'm trying to take notes. So now if I want to turn it off I have to disable the extension...

I have severe ADD, which makes reading long articles immensely difficult. This extension saved me so many times this school year, it's not even funny! I see a lot of people complaining about how it reformats the page, but that makes it perfect for someone like me. No distracting links on the sides, larger text, and a nice grey background that's easy on the eyes. I can actually focus on the article from start to finish, which is no small feat for someone with ADD. The only problem I have is that sometimes I need to refresh the extension a few times in order to get the page to format correctly. Other than that, I love it!

Works great, especially now that it is on by default and works inline on articles in select websites.

increase productivity

love it!! clearly to read

It helps so much that I wish it could just be on by default in my browser.

good

It's very nice for long articles. However, I noticed that it usually the first paragraph of the article doesn't appear...

I just wish it were automatic...

I have to agree with all the other reviewers who mentioned the unnecessary and simply bad reformatting of pages... I don't want the formatting of the page I'm on to change at all, I just want the colour alterations (which is the purpose of this extension). I immediately uninstalled it.

It meets what It intended to achieve: to follow line to line easier and efficient.

A great start to a brilliant idea. If only this could become a standard feature of Adobe Reader, e-readers, and all browsers. Personally I just use the paste board on your website since most of the documents I read are PDFs. I hope the developers make a fortune. Until then, could you please add a PayPal donate button to your website. Thank you.

Love it!

If this made changes to the page inline this would be a very good extension, but since it doesn't it was an imediate uninstall.

On the one hand, it clears the page of all formatting, and overlays the page with the colored text. On the other hand, this is exactly what I wanted it to do! Also, maybe it's just me, but I can see all of the pictures in the articles - I just went to Wikipedia to check. Definitely try it out!

Wow! So incredibly simple but extremely useful plugin! Love it for removing clutter so you can just focus on what you're reading. However, it would be nice to be able to not remove all images (a setting maybe?).

Man, I really wanted this to be good. Activating it kills all formatting. Trying to read a Wikipedia page, or some other article or page that uses images? Too bad, using this only gives you a stark white page with just the text. I can certainly see this being useful for text-heavy pages, and I would certainly love to see this applied to ebooks! But it isn't worth removing all pictures that may end up being important to the page.

I was interested in this for all of five minutes, including learning about it and using their website to try to get more information. It didn't stay in my browser more than a minute. All the formatting was gone, as another user mentioned. If this were used in-line when the page was loaded, I would be behind it, but as is, does not work for me. Instant uninstall.

The whole page gets refreshed and breaks the formatting. I thought it was literally an overlay with colored text but that isnt the case. Went to Lifehacker/Gizmodo/Consumerist and pressed the bee icon; text gets removed.

I love it for long articles! Definitely helps to prevent losing your place while reading, especially if you take time to read graphics, charts or closely check out images.