Highlight Vault — free Windows tool to pull Kindle highlights into a searchable local

[IlliniGrad]

Hi all — long-time lurker, first post. I built a small Windows tool for a problem I kept running into: Amazon's own "Kindle Notebook" web page is barely searchable, and I didn't want to pay a monthly subscription (Readwise etc.) just to browse my own highlights.

How it works: Highlight Vault logs into your Amazon account once via a real browser window (Playwright-driven, not a scripted/headless login — you see and complete the actual sign-in yourself), then reads your highlights from the Kindle Notebook page and caches them locally as JSON. After that first sync, everything runs off the local cache — search, browse, export — no repeated scraping unless you ask it to re-sync.

To be upfront about the limitation this crowd will immediately ask about: it currently reads from the Kindle Notebook web page, not from a device's My Clippings.txt. If you're hoping for direct device/clippings.txt import, that's not there yet — happy to hear if that's something people would actually want, since it'd be a fairly different code path (no browser automation needed at all for that case).

Also supports CSV import if you've got highlights from elsewhere, and Kobo import for anyone straddling both ecosystems.

Free tier (no time limit, no account): Kindle/Kobo/CSV import, search/filter by genre/colour/date, favorites, manual collections, export to Word/CSV/JSON.

Optional paid Pro (one-time, not a subscription): scheduled autosync, push to Notion/Obsidian/Google Docs, more export formats (EPUB/PDF/Anki), stats dashboard, spaced-repetition review, and a few organization extras.

Runs entirely locally — nothing phones home, no telemetry, no account with me required for the free tier.

Free download: http://highlightvaultapp.netlify.app

Genuinely curious what this community wants that I haven't thought of — you all know Kindle internals better than most places I could post this.