This tiny friction has stolen more developer hours than any bug ever will.
Source: Dev.to
There’s a tax on every developer’s day that nobody talks about.
Not the big stuff. Not the architecture decisions or the deployment pipelines. The small stuff. The stuff that happens so often it becomes invisible.
You’re on staging.myapp.com/dashboard/users/123/settings. You need to check the same page on prod. So you click the URL bar, triple‑click to select, delete the domain, type the new one, and hit enter.
Six seconds. No big deal.
Except you do it 40 times today. That’s 4 minutes of pure nothing. Every single day. Just moving between environments like it’s 2005, and we haven’t figured out a better way yet.
I got tired of it. So I built Soft.
Soft is a Chrome extension that puts a small bar at the top of every page you’ve configured. Click staging, prod, local—you land on the exact same path (query params, hash, everything preserved) in one click.
How it works
- Install Soft.
- Open the pop‑up, add your app, and map your environment URLs (takes about 60 seconds).
From that moment on, every time you visit a configured page, the bar appears. Your environments are right there, one click away.
Danger Mode
The bar turns red when you’re on production.
Every developer has a story: a migration run on prod instead of staging, a record deleted, an email sent to real users instead of test accounts. Danger Mode exists so you never have to tell that story.
- Free
- Always on
- No configuration needed
The sticky notes thing (Pro)
Leave a floating note on any page, in any environment. The note is keyed to the exact URL and environment and syncs via Chrome storage.
- Test cards on your checkout page
- Known bugs on the page where they appear
- Credentials for the staging environment you always forget
Right where you need them, not buried in Slack from weeks ago.
Free vs Pro
Free
- 2 apps, 2 environments each
- Danger Mode – always on
- Path‑preserving switch
- Jump button to open env in new tab
Pro – $6/month
- Unlimited apps and environments
- Sticky notes per page
- Team config export as JSON or YAML
- Unlimited exports
For the first 50 users! Use code NEW30 at checkout for 30 % off Pro.