MakerBadge alternatives: the maker badges compared, and when to build your own
A maker badge is a small widget in the corner of your site that lists everything else you have built. If you are looking for one you have probably found MakerBadge, which popularised the idea. This is a fair comparison of it with the alternatives, including the free one you can write yourself, written by the person who makes one of them. Weigh that accordingly; the facts below are checked, and the verdict is not always ours.
By Utkarsh Kushwaha · Updated
What every maker badge does
The mechanism is the same everywhere. You paste one script tag into each of your sites. The script fetches a list of your projects from one hosted place and draws a small badge, usually in a bottom corner, that opens into that list. Add a project to the list and every site that carries the badge shows it, without redeploying anything.
That last part is the whole reason to use one rather than hard-coding a footer. Everything else, the palettes, the shapes, the animation, is presentation. When you compare badges, compare the things that decide whether you will still have it installed in two years: what it costs over that time, how many projects it holds, what it does to the page it sits on, and whether it tells you if anyone clicks it.
MakerBadge
As of September 2026, MakerBadge has a free plan and a lifetime Pro plan. Free holds up to three project links and includes its 24 preset palettes, and the badge carries a "Made with MakerBadge" footer. Pro is a one-time $19 (listed down from $29) and adds unlimited links, custom hex colours, shapes and fonts, and removes that footer. Changes sync to installed badges within about a minute, and each maker gets a public profile at a username.
It does not offer click analytics, which it presents as a privacy feature, and that is a fair position to take: a badge that records nothing cannot leak anything. Its install snippet also carries an optional plain-text link, so the badge's link exists in your HTML even for a crawler that does not run JavaScript.
Where it is the right answer: you have three or fewer projects and want to pay nothing, or you want control over the badge's font and shape, or you have more than fifty projects to list.
Make Taksh
Make Taksh is this site. It has a free plan: the badge live on every site you own with 2 project links and 1 social, a public hub at maketaksh.com/u/yourname, 24 palettes plus custom hex colours, 17 animated backgrounds and custom label text, with a small Make Taksh footer. A one-time $5 lifetime unlock, with a 14-day refund, raises that to 50 project links and every social, and lets you hide the footer.
The difference that matters most is click insights. The dashboard shows which of your apps the badge sends people to and which of your sites sent them. It is built to be unjoinable: a click adds 1 to a counter keyed by link and hostname, with no cookie, no identifier and no path, and one attribute on the script tag switches it off. If you want to know whether the badge is doing anything, this is the one that can tell you.
The embed is under 8 KB gzipped, renders in a shadow root so it cannot touch your CSS, sets no cookies, and draws nothing at all if it fails to load. Changes reach installed badges within five minutes, because the profile is cached at the edge for that long, which is slower than MakerBadge's minute.
Where it is the right answer: you have two projects and want custom colours for free, you have more than three and would rather pay $5 than $19, or you want to see which of your sites actually sends traffic to the others.
Writing your own
A badge is not hard to build, and doing it yourself is free and entirely under your control. The minimum version is a JSON file of your projects hosted somewhere you control, and a small script that fetches it and renders a list. Put the script and the JSON on one domain, and every site that includes the script reads the same list.
The details are where the afternoon goes. Render inside a shadow root, or the host site's CSS will restyle your badge and yours will leak into theirs. Load with defer and render after the page, or you will move your own LCP. Make every failure path render nothing, because this runs on every page of everything you have shipped and a broken box is worse than no box. Set a CORS header on the JSON. Cache it at the edge. Keep it small enough that nobody ever has to think about it.
Where it is the right answer: you enjoy this kind of work, all your sites are ones you actively maintain, and you do not need a hub page or click counts. It is a good weekend project and a poor use of a launch week.
How to choose
Count what you have shipped. With one project, none of these is worth installing yet; there is nothing to cross-link. With two, both free plans cover you. With three, MakerBadge's free plan covers you and costs nothing, as long as you don't mind its footer on your badge. From four onward you are choosing between $19 and $5, and between a badge that records nothing and one that tells you which sites send traffic.
Then ask whether you will ever look at the numbers. If you would not, the analytics are not a reason to pick anything. If you would, and most people who ship a fourth project start caring which of the first three is pulling its weight, that is the question worth deciding on.
All three can be swapped later in the time it takes to change one script tag per site, which is the real point: none of these is a big decision, so do not spend a week on it.
Questions people ask about this
Is there a free maker badge?
Yes. MakerBadge has a free plan with up to three project links, and a hand-rolled script is free at any size. Make Taksh has a free plan with two project links and one social, and a single $5 payment for more.
Do maker badges slow down a website?
A well-built one does not. Both hosted badges load asynchronously and render after the page, so they cannot block your first paint. If you write your own, load it with defer and render into a shadow root, and it will not either.
Can I switch from one maker badge to another?
Yes, in a few minutes per site. Each one is a single script tag, so switching is replacing that line and re-entering your project list in the new tool.
Does a maker badge help SEO?
Modestly. It adds honest links between sites you own and to a hub that links back out to all of them, which is ordinary internal linking. It will not rank a page on its own; it helps search engines and people discover your other projects from the one they found.
Where Make Taksh fits
Make Taksh is one line of code you paste into each site you own. It renders a small badge in the corner that lists everything you have shipped, reading from one hosted list, so adding your next project is one edit and every site you have already installed it on picks it up within minutes. It is under 8 KB, renders in a shadow root so it cannot touch your CSS, sets no cookies, and draws nothing at all if it fails to load.