Every engineer at Contra Collective runs into the same problem on day one: too many accounts for any normal tool to handle. The average client engagement onboards us to a Slack, a Gmail, a Linear, one or two dashboards, a VPN, sometimes a Salesforce, and occasionally a custom internal tool that only has a web UI. Multiply by four concurrent engagements and you have a browser tab situation that melts Chrome by Thursday.
Browser profiles work in theory. In practice they fall apart the moment you need to quickly switch between a personal Gmail, a Contra Collective Gmail, and a client Gmail in the same fifteen minutes — and then get back to code. Profile switching is a full-window operation with its own cold-start. Tools like Franz and Rambox existed but felt designed for "manage 3 social accounts," not "manage 18 enterprise logins."
The requirements nobody was meeting
We wrote down what we actually needed, and every item on the list was a non-negotiable for the agency workflow:
- Per-account session isolation — not shared cookies, not a single Chromium profile with hacks. Separate storage, separate cache, separate extensions per account.
- Instant account switching — keyboard shortcut, no reload, no cold start. If it takes longer than a tab switch, it defeats the whole point.
- Unified notifications — surfaces across all accounts in one place. You cannot juggle 18 separate notification systems and stay sane.
- Persistent logins — stay signed into every account across restarts, OS updates, anything short of nuking the install.
- Native performance — lean app shell. Memory per session matters when you run 20 of them.
We looked around. Stack was closest but lived in a subscription model we didn't want for internal tooling. Franz/Ferdium predated modern Chromium isolation guarantees. Every "all-in-one" alternative was either a social media client in disguise or a bookmark manager with extra steps.
What we actually built
Switchboard started as a weekend Electron project in early 2025 and turned into a real tool because the agency kept using it. The core architecture is deliberately boring: an Electron shell, per-account Session partitions, a React UI for the sidebar and notification panel, SQLite for local metadata. The design decisions that actually mattered were all about what we refused to do — no cloud sync, no per-user telemetry, no "sign in to Switchboard" step before you can use Switchboard.
The isolation model is the load-bearing feature. Every account is a fresh BrowserView with its own partition, which means cookies, localStorage, IndexedDB, and service workers are all scoped to that one account. SSO tokens from a client's Azure AD can never see the personal Google OAuth state sitting next to it. This sounds obvious until you watch a browser profile system accidentally leak one into the other at the worst possible moment on a client demo.
Why it went public
Two reasons. The first: every new engineer we onboarded asked for it on their second day. The second: after enough client engagements, we realized the clients themselves had the same problem. Their internal teams were juggling just as many tools. Switchboard solved it for them too.
We shipped the commercial release in late 2025 with a lifetime license model — one purchase, every update, no subscription. Pricing is aligned with the use case (more expensive than a casual multi-account tool, cheaper than whatever ops tooling you were going to cobble together otherwise). Open source components of the core are available for developers who want to verify the session isolation claims themselves.
Where it fits in the Contra Collective toolchain
Switchboard lives next to the rest of what we've extracted from agency delivery. Linear CLI runs the delivery loop. Contra Swarm powers autonomous workflows for clients. GChat CLI handles terminal-first Google Chat. Switchboard is the layer everything else sits behind — the app that manages the accounts the other tools authenticate into.
If you've ever signed in to "just one more Slack" and watched your browser collapse, Switchboard was built for you by a team that collapsed theirs first.