I’m Nikhil (https://nikhilp.online). I've been building projects for the past few years, and decided to build ShillGuard because I kept hitting a wall when trying to share them on platforms like reddit and facebook.

I’d spend weeks building something, write a post and get it instantly removed by Reddit’s AutoMod or flagged as spam in Gmail without knowing why.

ShillGuard is a Chrome extension that analyzes your draft text in real-time against the specific context of where you are posting/sending.

How it works under the hood:

Instead of just checking grammar or tone, the extension injects a content script (built with Plasmo) to scrape the DOM and fetch contextual metadata before you hit submit.

On Reddit: When you type in a text editor, it grabs the subreddit name from the URL and fetches the specific rules.json and about.json endpoints in parallel. It also checks your current account stats (Karma/Account Age) against the community's typical thresholds to predict if you'll be filtered by AutoMod. I plan to add examples of recently popularized posts as well, to provide good examples of how the content "should" look in an ideal world.

On Facebook: It scrapes group metadata and privacy settings to warn you if your post (e.g., containing external links) violates specific group norms.

On Gmail: It analyzes your subject line and body for spam-trigger words and checks for "attachment" inconsistencies (e.g., saying "attached" but forgetting the file). I am enjoying building this feature out the most, as there are so many ways to make it produce high quality emails! Currently, I'm integrating a blacklist and spam check using an external API to help highlight if your account is being hidden by email providers.

The Tech Stack:

Framework: Plasmo (for the browser extension runtime)

Frontend: React + Tailwind CSS

Intelligence: Google Gemini Flash (via the new Google Gen AI SDK)

Architecture: It’s strictly Local-First / BYOK (Bring Your Own Key).

I decided to go with a Bring Your Own Key model for the AI analysis. Your API keys are stored in chrome.storage.local and the analysis requests go directly from your browser to Google. This keeps the extension privacy-focused and avoids me having to act as a middleman for your data.

It’s currently a paid extension (with a lifetime deal) but I really wanted to solve the "black box" frustration of platform moderation for indie hackers.

This is my first time working on a Chrome Extension so I'd love to hear feedback on whether Plasmo is the best framework to use, or any ideas for additional features!