Gabden started with a small annoyance that would not go away. We wanted comments on a site we ran, so we did what most people do and reached for the obvious hosted option. Within a day we were uncomfortable with what we had installed, and the more we looked at the alternatives, the more it seemed like every choice asked us to give up something we did not want to give up.
What bothered us about the popular option
The easy hosted tool was free, and it was quickly clear who was paying for that. It loaded a large amount of script onto every page, slowing things down. It set tracking cookies and built profiles of our readers so it could sell ads against our traffic. Our visitors were being followed across the web through a widget we had embedded, and the benefit went to the vendor, not to us and not to them.
We did not want to run an ad network on our comment section. We just wanted readers to be able to talk.
The alternatives each cost something
So we looked around. The pattern was consistent: every option solved one problem by creating another.
- The GitHub-backed widgets were light and private, but they required every commenter to have a GitHub account. Fine for a developer audience, useless for a general one.
- The self-hosted open source tools were private and gave us full control, but they meant running and patching a server, handling spam ourselves, and owning the uptime. That is real work that never ends.
- The platform-locked comments were tied to a single CMS, and we did not want to be trapped there.
None of them let a regular reader leave a comment easily while also respecting that reader's privacy and staying out of our way. That gap is the reason Gabden exists.
What we decided it should be
We wrote down the properties we actually wanted, and they became the product.
It had to be private by default. No tracking cookies, no fingerprinting, no cross-site tracking, and only anonymous aggregate analytics. If we do not collect reader profiles, there is nothing to sell and nothing to leak.
It had to be light. A page should not slow down because it has a comment section. The embed is around 10KB and loads asynchronously, so it stays out of the way of the page and out of the way of Core Web Vitals.
It had to be easy for readers. People can comment anonymously, as a guest with just a name and email, or by signing in with Google or GitHub if they want a persistent identity. The reader chooses how much to commit, not the site owner.
It had to be easy for owners. One script tag, keyed to the page's canonical URL, that works on WordPress, Ghost, static sites, and the rest. Moderation you can tune from pre-moderating everything to auto-approving returning verified people. A blocked-word filter, threaded replies, and reactions, without a server to maintain.
Owning your own words
The last principle mattered as much as the others: your data is yours. You can export every comment as JSON or CSV, and Gabden imports existing comments from Disqus, native WordPress, and other systems mapped to each page's URL, so switching to it does not mean abandoning your history. We had felt trapped by tools that made leaving hard, and we did not want to build another trap.
We kept the pricing honest too. Free up to 100,000 widget views per month per website, with a small "Powered by Gabden" mark, and five dollars per month per website to remove it and lift the cap. The tool is paid for by people who choose to pay, not by quietly monetizing readers who never agreed to it.
That is the whole story. We wanted comments that respect the people reading, stay fast, and leave us in control of our own data, and no existing option gave us all three at once. So we built the one we wanted to use. If it sounds like what you want too, you can try it on your own site, or read more about how the discussion widget works.
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