Tools that don't leave your machine.

Every tool on the page runs entirely in your browser. There is no API. There is no upload. There is no "Sign in to save your work." Paste a JSON blob into the formatter, close the tab, and the blob is gone, because there's no server-side copy, because there's no server.

This sounds small until you audit what the rest of the internet does with your files. The free "PDF to Word" sites mostly upload your document, convert it, and email you a link to a file living on someone's S3 bucket for a month. The free "format my JSON" sites mostly ship your JSON to a server that almost certainly logs it. If you've ever pasted production data into one to debug something at 11 p.m., you have leaked production data to a stranger.

The rule isn't really privacy theater. It's about removing a tax I didn't know I was paying: the small recurring decision of is this thing I'm about to paste sensitive enough that I shouldn't. Client-side only means the answer is always no, which means I never have to think about it again.

The page assumes you're on a laptop, not a phone. It also assumes you showed up because you've got something to convert right now. So the keyboard does the work:

Each tool has its own bindings too: copy, clear, swap input and output, toggle theme. Part muscle-memory ergonomics, part self-imposed rule that keeps the tools simple. If I can't drive a tool almost entirely from the keyboard, that usually means it's trying to do too much, so I split it in two.

The base64 encoder doesn't decode. The decoder sits one tile to the right. Sure, they could be a single component with a tab switcher. They aren't. That tab switcher would cost a keystroke, and I didn't want to spend it.

The genuinely depressing thing about most online utilities is that they aren't utilities. They're funnels. The free converter sells you on the paid converter. The paid converter sells you on the SaaS subscription. The subscription sells you on an enterprise contract. By the time any actual converting happens, you've handed over your email three times and dismissed two upsell modals.

My rule is simple. A tool here does one thing, does it on the first screen, and asks for nothing. No accounts. No "Pro version." No upsells. Favorites and recents live in localStorage, because the alternative is a database, and a database means I'd have to know who you are. I'd rather not. The most ambitious thing on the page is a JSON-to-TypeScript-types generator, and it doesn't even have a settings page.

This is a watered-down version of whatever instinct produced the good Unix tools. cat has no freemium tier. grep never asks you to verify your email. The web forgot, slowly, that this used to be the default. So the page is a small attempt to remember.

Roughly what's in there: text and JSON tools (formatter, diff, case converter, Markdown table builder, JSON-to-TS-types), encoders (base64, URL, HTML entities, hashes), image and design helpers (SVG optimizer, color picker, contrast checker, aspect-ratio calculator, palette extractor), data converters (CSV, cron expressions, timestamps, regex tester). Then a handful of one-offs that earned a permanent home: a UUID generator, a Lorem Ipsum generator that tries to be a little funnier than the standard one, a character counter that knows a grapheme from a code point.

The categories are ordered by how often I use them. That's probably not how often you would. Any tool with enough traffic to deserve a spotlight gets a "NEW" badge for thirty days, then rejoins the rest. Recents and favorites float to the top, so the page slowly personalizes itself. It never asks permission.

Honestly? Because getting a small tool exactly right is one of the most satisfying things I know how to do. A good utility takes one argument and hands back one value. You can write the whole spec in a sentence. And the loop is fast: describe the function, watch it come together, drop it in the registry, watch it work. After a long week of essays whose ideas might not even be true and features nobody can measure the value of, an afternoon spent making a CSV-to-Markdown converter feel exactly right is a clean, finishable kind of win.

There's a less wholesome reason too. The modern web has gotten really good at making me feel like I'm renting access to my own data, and the toolshed is a small, stubborn argument that some things should just be functions. Paste in. Get out. Close the tab. No relationship.

The page is going to keep growing. If there's a utility you want that isn't there, the issue tracker is open and I read it. Next up is a handful of audio tools, a waveform viewer, a simple spectrogram, a format converter, because I keep opening Audacity for thirty-second tasks. They'll show up the way the rest did: quietly, on a Tuesday, with no announcement and no upsell.