For Schools
Bonsai is free for your students.
Nothing to buy, no accounts, no data collected. Bonsai Citations is a public service built by a high-school student — free for every student, every teacher, every school, with no license, no invoice, and no sales call.
What that means for you
- ✓Free for everyone. There is no school tier and nothing to purchase — no cost of any kind. Every feature is the same for every student, everywhere.
- ✓No student accounts. Students never sign up, never log in, and never create a password. The tool just works when they open it.
- ✓No student data collected. Bonsai has no accounts, and the extension makes no network requests — every citation is built on the student's own device. There is no server to store data on, so there is nothing to breach, sell, or subpoena. FERPA-simple: you can't lose data you never collect.
- ✓Deploys like any Chrome extension. If your IT admin wants it on every managed device, they can add it to the Google Admin force-install list — the same console you already use to allowlist extensions. No rostering, no setup on each device.
Nothing to buy — just free.
Questions schools ask
Our school blocks Chrome extensions.
Good — keep it that way. Schools block extensions wholesale through the same Google Admin console you'd deploy from: your default policy denies everything, and specific extensions are allowlisted and force-installed as exceptions. Bonsai deploys through that exact mechanism. Your block policy stays fully in place; Bonsai becomes one sanctioned, allowlisted exception that installs only on your managed profiles — and no student can add it on their own.
What student data do you collect?
None. Bonsai has no accounts and the extension makes no network requests — every citation is built on the student's own device. There is no server to store data on, so there's nothing to breach, sell, or subpoena. That's what makes it FERPA-simple: you can't lose data you never collect.
Is it really free? What's the catch?
It's free, with no catch. There are no ads, no accounts, no upsell, and no data collection to monetize. Bonsai is a public service one student built because every citation tool he tried was a maze of logins and pop-ups. If it helps your students, that's the whole point.
Does it work offline?
Yes. The citation engine runs entirely in the browser, so students can build citations for books and typed-in sources with no internet connection. (Citing a live web page still needs that page to be open, since the extension reads the tab you're on.)
Is this doing the work for them?
No. Bonsai formats what students already found — it cannot write, summarize, or think for them. There is zero text generation anywhere in the product. It fills in the punctuation and order of a citation from details the student supplies; the reading, the judgment, and the writing are all still theirs.