Is this project open source? Yes
Is this project completely free? No (free tier with a 3-sync lifetime allowance, plus an optional one-time Pro license at $19.99)
Is this project vibe-coded beyond the author’s ability to comprehend how it works? No
Community Directory: [Highlight Inbox Synthesizer](https://community.obsidian.md/plugins/highlight-inbox-synthesizer)
I kept running into the same complaint in reading and PKM communities: people sync hundreds of highlights from Readwise, Snipd, or Kindle into their vault, and then never open the folder again. The highlights pile up into a kind of graveyard. The effort of saving them is spent, but nothing comes back out.
So I built a plugin that reads the whole folder and writes one synthesis note. For each source it gives a short summary, the key claims, and a topic list. Then it looks across sources and pulls out the themes that show up in more than one place, with a note on where the sources agree and where they pull in different directions. Re-running is incremental, so unchanged sources are skipped.
It is not locked to Readwise. Anything that lands in the configured folder or carries the tag is read the same way, including notes you write by hand. It runs on your own API key, with no server and no account.
I am not a software engineer by background, so I built this with a lot of AI help, and I have tried to keep the parsing defensive because highlight exports vary a lot between people’s templates.
Pro license (optional): [Gumroad](https://ibrh96.gumroad.com/l/vtqocc)
If you have a highlight backlog like this, I would like to know how you currently deal with it. Do you go through them by hand, use a Dataview query as a to-do list, or just let them sit? I want to understand what the realistic workflow looks like before I add more to this.
I frequently run into the overloaded inbox problem.
From your github repo, I see that the summary is done by a LLM but it requires an API key. Does this mean you absolutely need an API key type of subscription?
And does your synthesis note include a link back to the original highlights? Being able to verify one line without re-reading everything in the folder is kind of important.
And what is your expected workflow once you have the synthesis. Is there another tool to help you manage this information and add value to your knowledge base?
Good questions, thanks for actually reading the repo.
On the API key: no subscription to me, none at all. You bring your own key (Anthropic, OpenAI, or OpenRouter) and pay your chosen provider directly, pay-as-you-go on their side. I don’t run any billing or metering — the only thing I sell is an optional one-time Pro license that lifts the 3-sync free cap, and that’s verified fully offline.
On linking back to source: partial right now, and you’ve found a real gap. The Themes section does link back — each theme lists its member notes as [[wikilinks]], so you can jump straight to a source from there. But the per-source summary sections currently just show the note title as plain text, no link. The underlying data (full vault path, and even per-highlight block IDs where present) is already tracked, it’s just not rendered into that section yet. That’s a legitimate feature request, not a structural limitation — I’ll look at wiring it in.
On the workflow after synthesis: right now it’s a single markdown note in your vault (no separate app), so you read/triage it like any other note — link out to themes, mark things, whatever your normal note workflow is. No additional tool required, but also nothing fancier than that yet.
Hey @gauthierae — circling back on this. The per-source sections now link back to the original note, same [[wikilink]] style as the Themes section, with the readable title kept as the link alias. It shipped in 1.1.0, so a plugin update in Obsidian should pull it in. Thanks for flagging it — it was a clean, small change and a good call.
Quick update: added a persistent “Upgrade to Pro” section to the Settings panel (right under the license key field). Before this, if you never hit the free-tier limit, there was no indication Pro even existed — now it’s visible either way, with a one-click link to the license page. Same v1.1.1 release as the upgrade modal from a few days ago.