Three Chrome extensions are currently in the market for France Schengen visa slot monitoring: Visa Master, VisaReady, and TLSContact Appointment Booker. If you are trying to decide between them, here is the comparison you actually need — not marketing copy, but a side-by-side look at how each tool works, what it costs, what it does with your data, and what happens if it never finds you a slot.
The Full Comparison Table
Before the detail, the headline numbers:
| Dimension | Visa Master Free | Visa Master Premium | VisaReady | TLSContact Appointment Booker |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Upfront cost | £0 | £0 | Subscription | Subscription |
| Success fee | n/a | £19 on booking only | n/a | n/a |
| Refund if no booking | n/a (free) | ✅ 24-hour window | Typically no | Typically no |
| Monitoring approach | Local (your browser) | Local (your browser) | Server-side | Server-side |
| Touches your TLS login | ❌ | ✅ with explicit consent | Depends on setup | Depends on setup |
| TLS password stored remotely | ❌ | ❌ | Not documented | Not documented |
| Desktop notification | ✅ | ✅ | Varies | Varies |
| Telegram alerts | ✅ BYOB | ✅ BYOB | Usually | Usually |
| Auto-book | ❌ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Open source | Partially | Partially | No | No |
| CWS link | Install | Same extension | CWS | CWS |
The rest of this article unpacks what each of those rows actually means in practice.
How Does Each Extension Actually Monitor Slots?
This is the most important technical distinction and the one most comparison posts skip.
Visa Master (both tiers) monitors TLScontact inside your own Chrome browser session. The extension's service worker polls the TLScontact appointment calendar on a regular cadence — typically every 20–40 seconds — by reading the DOM of the page you are already logged into. No request goes through an external server. The extension's manifest host permissions are scoped to *.tlscontact.com and torly.ai only — you can verify this in the Chrome Web Store listing or in the publicly available extension source.
This matters for two reasons. First, privacy: TLScontact never sees a request that did not come from your IP address and your authenticated session. Second, reliability: the extension sees exactly what you would see if you were looking at the page — including slots that might be rate-limited or hidden from server-side scrapers.
VisaReady and TLSContact Appointment Booker operate differently. Both use server-side infrastructure to poll TLScontact, which means their servers are making requests to TLScontact on your behalf. This introduces latency (the server has to detect the slot, then push a notification to you), a dependency on the vendor's uptime, and questions about what credentials or session tokens you provide to enable that access.
Neither VisaReady nor TLSContact Appointment Booker publishes a detailed privacy architecture document. If you are considering them, the key questions to ask are: where are your TLScontact credentials stored, who can access them, and what happens to them if the service shuts down?
Pricing: What You Actually Pay
Visa Master Free: Nothing. No trial, no card required, no expiry.
Visa Master Premium: Nothing upfront. If the extension successfully books a slot for you, a £19 success fee is charged via Stripe. If it runs for weeks and never finds a bookable slot, you owe nothing. There is a 24-hour refund window after a successful booking — relevant if TLScontact cancels or the appointment does not meet your needs.
VisaReady: Subscription model. The price is visible on their Chrome Web Store listing. You pay whether or not it ever finds you a slot.
TLSContact Appointment Booker: Also subscription-based. Same dynamic — you pay for access to the monitoring tool, not for a result.
The incentive alignment point is worth stating plainly. A success-fee model means the tool's financial interest is identical to yours: it only makes money if it books a slot. A subscription model means the tool makes money regardless of whether you get an appointment. That does not make subscription tools bad — but it does mean you should evaluate them on their demonstrated track record, not their marketing claims.
Telegram Notifications: BYOB vs Channel-Based
All three extensions support some form of Telegram notification. The approach differs.
Visa Master uses a bring-your-own-bot (BYOB) model: you create a Telegram bot via @BotFather, give the extension your bot token, and the extension pings that bot when a slot appears. The token never leaves your device and never passes through torly.ai. You own the notification channel entirely.
The step-by-step Telegram setup guide covers this in detail, including how to create the bot and add your chat ID in under five minutes.
VisaReady and TLSContact Appointment Booker route Telegram notifications through their own infrastructure. This means their servers know when a slot appeared, which centre, and which user was notified. Whether that is acceptable depends on your privacy tolerance.
Auto-Book: How It Works and What Can Go Wrong
Auto-booking is the capability that separates Premium tools from notification-only tools. When a slot appears, the extension fills the TLScontact booking form — applicant name, date of birth, appointment type — and submits it without requiring you to be at your keyboard.
The full auto-book mechanics piece explains the technical flow in detail. The short version: the extension must have your TLScontact login credentials to re-authenticate if you have been logged out (TLScontact sessions expire), and it must know which appointment slot preferences to accept.
For Visa Master Premium, credential storage is explicit and documented: your TLScontact credentials are encrypted locally using AES-GCM with a per-install salt. They are never transmitted to torly.ai. The only data that reaches torly.ai is your installId (a random UUID), your Stripe email, the bookingId after a successful booking, and the slot timestamp and centre. Not your password, not your session token, not the DOM contents of the TLScontact page.
For VisaReady and TLSContact Appointment Booker, the credential handling is not publicly documented to this level of detail. This is not an accusation of bad practice — it is a gap in available information that you should fill before providing your TLScontact login to either tool.
What the Public Track Record Shows
We do not have independently verified booking success rate data for any of these extensions, and we are not going to invent numbers. What we can point to is the Chrome Web Store review section for each extension, the Schengen-master GitHub repository for Visa Master's open-source components, and community discussion in the growing Visa Master user base.
If you are evaluating any tool in this category, the Chrome Web Store "Reviews" tab for each extension is the most honest signal available. Look specifically for reviews that mention whether the tool actually resulted in a booking, and treat five-star reviews posted on the day of install with appropriate scepticism.
Which Extension Should You Install?
For notification-only with zero cost and maximum privacy: Visa Master Free. It is the only option that is genuinely free, genuinely local, and publicly documented.
For auto-booking with risk-aligned pricing: Visa Master Premium. Pay £19 only when you get a booking; 24-hour refund window if something goes wrong.
For auto-booking with an upfront subscription and server-side scanning: VisaReady or TLSContact Appointment Booker. These are valid choices if you have reviewed their privacy practices and are comfortable with the subscription model. We cannot recommend them over Visa Master on pricing or privacy grounds, but we also will not claim they do not work.
Save the £19 success fee until you actually book — install Visa Master Free now from the Chrome Web Store and upgrade to Premium only if you want the auto-book capability.
For a broader look at all the methods available — not just Chrome extensions — see How to Book a France Visa Appointment in 2026: 7 Methods, Ranked. For the detailed technical privacy story, read How Visa Master Watches TLScontact Without Touching Your Login.
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