Allihat: Good App, Hard Sell

Reviewing software has become a minefield. Post something positive and somebody decides you must be the developer in disguise. Review a paid app and a crowd shows up to litigate every penny; make it a subscription and they bring reinforcements. Privacy-focused readers want to know where every byte goes, and given the state of surveillance capitalism, that's fair. Then there's the elephant in the room: AI. Half the internet bristles at it for reasons that are at least partly justified, while the other half has quietly used it to do things that would have been difficult to impossible without it. None of that changes what a review is for: what the app does, who it helps, and what I learned from actually testing it. So here goes. AlliHat AlliHat is a Safari extension by Nathan Kontny that puts an AI assistant — Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or Apple's on-device model — in the Safari sidebar (App Store). Free download, $29.99/year IAP, macOS 14 or later. Features BYOK. Bring your own key from any of the paid models, or use Apple's built-in model entirely on-device. Communication with the paid models is direct — no middleman — and your key stays on your machine. Agent Mode (Claude only). Clicks, fills forms, scrolls, and navigates pages for you; essentially Claude-in-Chrome for Safari. If you've de-Googled and want to stay that way, this gets you a Chrome-native feature without Chrome. Per-URL conversations. Chats about a page are saved against its URL and reappear when you revisit. In Agent Mode, you can save and reuse workflows for repeated tasks. PDF handling. Open a PDF in Safari and AlliHat can read and summarize it, NotebookLM-style. It handles scans and tables too. YouTube summaries via video transcripts. Native Safari App Extension. 603 KB, no Electron. Global hotkey (⌘⇧C) and right-click actions on selected text: Explain, Summarize, Synonyms. Comparable Apps Sider works in Safari, Chrome, and Edge with a free tier and paid plans from roughly $8.30/month, but it's credit-metered and routes through Sider's servers rather than your own API key. Elephas ($9.99/month, $99/year, or lifetime tiers) is a Mac-wide AI assistant that works in every app, not just Safari, but has no browsing agent mode. BrainyAI is a free, open-source sidebar alternative to Sider and Monica, but Chrome-only. Beyond extensions, an AI sidebar is a built-in feature of the AI browsers (Dia, Perplexity's Comet, OpenAI's Atlas) and of Anthropic's own Claude extension for Chrome. AlliHat exists precisely because Safari has none of these. Who It's For If you only use Safari for privacy or battery reasons and want page-aware AI without switching browsers or paying a second subscription on top of your API costs. BYOK plus a native extension is exactly the right architecture for that person, and nothing else on Safari that I am aware of offers an agent mode at all. That's the catch: $29.99/year plus your own API bills for one browser's sidebar is a hard sell when switching to Chrome gets you Claude's extension free, and Apple keeps folding more AI into Safari itself. Good app; the pricing math is the part you have to make peace with.