What it does
The DemandBird browser extension does two unrelated jobs. Most people install it for one of them and never touch the other.
The web clipper. Highlight text on any page and send it to your Inspiration Vault as raw material โ an article, someone else's post, a forum thread, your own notes. Works everywhere.
Substack Notes publishing. Substack has no API for Notes, so the extension is what actually posts them at their scheduled time. Covered in full on the Substack page.
Installing
Install from the Chrome Web Store. The link is in the app at Settings โ Chrome Extension.
It runs in Chrome, Arc, Brave, Edge and other Chromium browsers. There is no Firefox or Safari build.
Connecting it
Click the extension icon and choose Connect Account. It opens a DemandBird page in a new tab, you confirm, and it is linked. Nothing to copy or paste.
If that flow does not work โ a locked-down browser profile, or you would rather do it by hand โ the popup has a Manual configuration section that takes an API token and your Account ID. Both are on the same page in the app.
Clipping something
- Select text on any page.
- A small Clip to DemandBird button appears next to the selection. Click it. (You can also right-click and choose Send to DemandBird, or use the toolbar icon.)
- The clip lands in your Vault as a draft, waiting.
On X/Twitter, LinkedIn and Substack the extension also captures the source: the permalink to the post and who wrote it, saved alongside the text. So a clip from somebody's LinkedIn post is not an anonymous paragraph three weeks later โ you can see whose point you were reacting to.
Elsewhere it saves the page URL.
Turning a clip into a post
Clips are deliberately not posts. Publishing somebody else's paragraph is not what this is for.
Open the clip in DemandBird and either write your own take with the clip in front of you, or use Draft from this to have the Voice Engine write it in your voice using the clip as the thing being responded to. Either way the output is yours, not a reposting of theirs.
See Inspiration Vault for what happens after the clip lands.
Substack Notes
If you connect Substack, the extension handles the parts Substack's API does not expose: reading your publication details, and publishing Notes.
The important thing to know is that your browser has to be running for a Substack Note to go out at its scheduled time, because the extension is the thing publishing it. The Substack page explains the arrangement, including the newer path that hands the schedule to Substack's own servers.
Everything else DemandBird publishes goes out from our servers and does not care whether your browser is open.
What it can reach
The clipper's button runs on every page, because you might want to clip from anywhere. It reads a page only when you make a selection and click clip, and it sends only that selection, the page URL, and the author where it can find one.
Substack pages and DemandBird itself are the only sites it talks to beyond that, and only for the jobs above.
When something is wrong
No clip button on a selection. Reload the page โ a tab that was already open when the extension installed or updated has not loaded it yet.
"Not connected". Reconnect from the popup. This usually means you signed out of DemandBird in that browser, or the token was revoked.
A Substack Note did not go out. Check the browser was awake, and check the Substack connection in the popup. Substack sign-in expires and needs redoing periodically.
A clip landed with no source link. Expected on most of the web. Only X/Twitter, LinkedIn and Substack have layouts the extension knows how to read a permalink out of.
Availability
The clipper and Substack publishing work on every plan.