Brave launches Origin, a $60 browser that removes the features it added without asking you first

Brave has launched Brave Origin, a paid version of its browser priced at a one-time fee of $59.99 that covers up to 10 devices. That price gets you a cleaner browser that strips out the features Brave has added over the years that many users never wanted in the first place.

Origin removes quite a lot. Leo AI, Brave Rewards, Brave Wallet, Brave News, the VPN, Tor integration, Talk, email aliases, Speedreader, sponsored images, and a handful of other additions are all gone. What stays is Brave Shields, the ad- and tracker-blocking that made Brave popular to begin with.

Origin is available as a standalone download or as an in-app upgrade for existing Brave users. For Linux users, Origin is free because many Linux distributions already include Brave with most of these extra features turned off by default. However, Linux users can still purchase a license to support the project.

The idea that Brave accumulated a crypto wallet, an AI assistant, a news feed, a rewards program, and more over the years without most users asking for them, and is now charging $60 to take them back out, has not exactly been met with enthusiasm. Plenty of people have pointed out that most of what Origin removes can already be disabled in the free version through settings or enterprise group policies.

Brave's counterargument is that most users will never find or access those settings, and that Origin strips these features at compile time, producing a leaner build than virtually any free browser based on Chromium's Blink rendering engine. The company is also making a broader argument about browser economics, saying there is no such thing as a truly free browser and that Chrome is free because Google turns every user into the product, harvesting personal data to fuel its advertising business.

The free version of Brave is not going anywhere and works exactly as it did before. Origin is for the subset of users who want the original promise without years of additions layered on top and are willing to pay for it.