Rustem Mussabekov

Rustem Mussabekov is a Kazakh designer and developer best known as the founder of Raindrop.io, a cross-platform bookmark manager used on the web, iPhone, iPad, Mac, Windows, Android and every major browser. He has built and run Raindrop.io since 2013, largely as a one-person company.

Mussabekov started out as a UI designer and front-end developer. He lived in Russia for many years and started Raindrop.io there, releasing it in 2013 as a browser extension for saving and organising links in visual collections. After the war in Ukraine began in 2022 he moved back to Kazakhstan, which he calls his homeland, transferred the business there and said in a 2023 statement that he is no longer associated with Russia. He is based in Astana.

Raindrop.io grew into a full bookmarking service: nested collections, tags, highlights, annotations, duplicate and broken-link detection, a permanent web archive of saved pages, public collection pages, team sharing and an API with thousands of integrations. It follows a freemium model, with unlimited bookmarks free and a Pro plan for full-text search, backups, archiving and AI features. Its native iOS and iPadOS app was rewritten from scratch in 2023, and the client apps are open source on GitHub.

The service gained a wave of new users when Mozilla shut down Pocket in July 2025 and Raindrop.io became one of the most recommended replacements. Since 2024 Mussabekov has added AI suggestions for collections and tags, PDF highlighting, a macOS share extension, an MCP server and, in 2026, Stella, an AI assistant that can chat with saved articles, PDFs and YouTube transcripts.

He matters as a rare example of a solo founder sustaining a consumer productivity service across every platform for more than a decade without outside funding, competing with products from Mozilla, Google and well-funded startups.