Droplet — the water behind your browsing

About

Every click has a water cost. Droplet shows you.

Loading a web page and sending an AI prompt both draw on water — to cool the data centres that serve them, and to generate the electricity that powers them. It's invisible, so it's easy to forget it's there. Droplet puts a number on it, right in your toolbar.

Open the popup and a vessel fills with the water behind today's browsing, split between the pages you've loaded and the AI prompts you've sent. One click takes you to a plain-language page showing exactly how every figure is worked out, with links to the research behind it.

What you get


A live tally of the estimated water footprint of your browsing, updated as you go
Separate figures for page loads and AI prompts, across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and more
A fully sourced methodology page — every constant explained and cited, no hand-waving
Honest ranges instead of false precision, because the published science genuinely disagrees
Longer prompts weighted higher than short ones, so the estimate tracks what you actually do
A detection log you can inspect yourself to see what's being counted and why


Built on published science
Page estimates follow the Sustainable Web Design Model (v4), the open standard behind established web-carbon tools: bytes transferred → energy → water. AI-prompt estimates draw on figures from UC Riverside, Google and Mistral — which span from a fraction of a millilitre to tens of millilitres per prompt. Rather than pick one and pretend it's exact, Droplet shows the range, and lets you narrow it to a specific model if you know which you use.

Private by design
Everything is calculated and stored on your own device. Droplet has no account, no analytics, no ads and no servers, and it never sends your browsing anywhere. For AI prompts it uses only a count and a rough length — the text of your prompts never leaves the page.

Honest about its limits
Droplet is an estimator, not a meter. Third-party content that hides its size is undercounted, some AI assistants can't be measured from the browser at all, and the underlying figures are averages. All of this is stated openly on the methodology page — because a footprint tool you can't trust isn't worth installing.

For anyone curious about the physical cost of a digital habit, and who'd rather see an honest estimate than a comforting one.