Switcher 2026: The What, Why, and How of Brave Origin ⭐

Last week, Brave announced Brave Origin, a minimalist new version of its flagship web browser. It's free on Linux, which is interesting, but costs $60 for those on Windows, Mac, iPhone, iPad, and/or Android.

I don't mind the cost: I feel strongly that we should support the products and services we rely on and use regularly, and one could argue that Brave, with its privacy focus, is doing God's work. Plus, it's a one-time fee, not a recurring subscription charge, and you don't have to pay more if you use Brave on multiple platforms.

That said, there are three, well, oddities here. Not issues or problems. Just some things to question and consider.

First and most obviously, how did Brave get to the point where a more minimalist version of this browser, one that ships with various Brave-specific features often tied to the thorny problem of how this company can make money when it gives its primary product, this browser, away for free?

Second, why would anyone pay for Brave when you can easily remove all the features that are disabled for you by default in Brave Origin? I wrote about how to do this a few years back in How I Configure Brave, for example.

And third, why would anyone pay for Brave when there are so many viable alternatives? You can reasonably protect your privacy and security by installing the right extensions in just about any browser. And there are some browsers, including the excellent new Helium browser, that offer the same privacy and security benefits of Brave out of the box too.

To find out, I've been evaluating Brave Origin for the past week on multiple PCs and my Pixel 10 Pro XL (a version for iPhone and iPad is coming soon). Brave was kind enough to let me do this for free, essentially, which made the decision a bit easier. But I would have gone through this regardless, I think.
What is Brave Origin?
So what is this thing?

At its core, Brave Origin is Brave, so it provides all the core benefits of Brave, including the integrated ad and tracker blocking and the Brave Shields protections, and all the performance benefits one gets from that. But Brave Origin doesn't ship with several Brave features, things like Leo AI, News, Rewards/Brave Ads, Speedreader, VPN, Wallet, and some others that are tied to Brave's business model. And Brave says that any future revenue-generating features it adds to the main browser won't appear in Brave Origin.

Brave is a business, not a charity, and so it has experimented with ways to make money while offering a product that no one pays for in a market teeming with free alternatives and Big Tech bundleware lock-in. Some of these ideas are controversial, or were. But I feel like we need to give Brave, the company, a bit of latitude here, and for two reasons. Brave's user-first privacy focus is so important and stands in sharp contrast to what Google and Microsoft, especially, do with their browsers. And Brave lets you remove anything you don't want from its browsers...