Fast, free, no-nonsense web tools.
ToolsAre.Us is a small, independent collection of free online tools. The idea is simple: the little utilities people reach for every day — a calculator, a unit converter, a word counter, a barcode generator, an image compressor — should be instant, clean, free of clutter, and respectful of your privacy. No sign-ups, no paywalls, no endless pop-ups.
The home page lists the full, growing set of tools, including a scientific calculator, unit and color converters, a JSON formatter, a QR & barcode generator, an image compressor, a text-to-speech and speech-to-text pair, a PDF toolkit, a notepad-style code editor, a password generator, and a handful of fun tests for typing, clicking, and reaction speed. New tools are added over time.
ToolsAre.Us is built and maintained by an independent developer who enjoys making small, useful web software. The site is kept free with the help of unobtrusive advertising. If you'd like to suggest a tool, report a bug, or just say hello, use the suggestion form or the contact page.
Every public tool lives under https://toolsare.us/<tool>/. That keeps the site as one property for visitors and search engines. Friendly subdomains still work: they redirect permanently to the matching folder so old links do not break. Shared assets such as logos and theme scripts load from /assets/.
Each tool page follows the same shape, because a predictable layout is easier to use than a clever one: the tool itself at the top so it is usable immediately, then an explanation of what it does, worked examples, common mistakes, honest limitations, and a short FAQ. The guides sit apart from all of that — they are reference articles about the underlying subjects rather than documentation for any particular tool.
Almost everything here is plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript running directly in your browser, with no framework in between. That is a deliberate choice rather than a limitation. It means a tool page loads in a fraction of a second on a slow connection, keeps working when the network drops, and does not depend on a build pipeline that will stop working in three years. It also means the code doing the work is right there in the page, readable by anyone who wants to check what it does.
The consequence you can actually observe is that the tools do not need a server to do their job. Your text, your images, your files and your passwords are processed by code running on your own device. There is no upload, so there is nothing sitting on someone else’s disk waiting to be backed up, logged or leaked. If you want to verify that rather than take it on trust, the guide on what “runs in your browser” actually means explains how to check any site’s claim using tools your browser already has.
A few tools genuinely do need a server, and they are the ones that create links for other people: shared countdowns, RSVP lists and Watch Together rooms. A link someone else can open has to point at data someone else can reach — there is no way around that. Those pages say so plainly rather than maintaining a blanket claim that everything is local.
Each tool page aims to explain what the tool does, how to use it, at least a couple of concrete examples, and clear limitations. We prefer short, plain language over marketing filler. If a tool stores data on a server so a share link can work, the page says so instead of pretending everything is always local.
Some things you will not find here, because they are the standard furniture of low-quality tool sites: invented user counts, fabricated testimonials, badges for awards nobody gave out, star ratings in the search results that no one ever submitted, or claims that a tool is the best of its kind. Structured data on tool pages describes the application and its FAQ, and deliberately omits aggregate ratings, because there are no genuine ratings to report.
Where a tool has a real weakness, the page says so. Optical character recognition on a poor photograph will make mistakes. A browser cannot compress video the way a desktop application can. A barcode torn through a guard pattern may be unrecoverable. Saying so is more useful than the alternative, and a tool that admits what it cannot do is easier to trust about what it can.
New tools appear when they solve a clear, common problem and can stay simple enough to load instantly and work offline. Suggestions influence priorities, especially when several people ask for the same thing independently — that is usually a sign of a real gap rather than a personal preference.
Ideas get turned down mostly for one of three reasons: the job genuinely needs a server and cannot be done on your device; a browser cannot do it well enough to be worth using; or it would require accounts and stored personal data, which is exactly what this site is trying to avoid. If you suggest something and it is not built, that is usually why.
ToolsAre.Us is built and maintained by an independent developer who enjoys making small, useful web software. There is no company, no team and no investors — which is worth knowing, because it explains both the response times and the absence of anything resembling a sales funnel. If you’d like to suggest a tool, report a bug, or just say hello, use the suggestion form or the contact page.
Ads help pay for servers and domain costs, which is what keeps every tool here free and free of accounts. We use a consent notice for non-essential cookies and document advertising partners in the privacy policy. Advertising is confined to pages with actual content; the tool pages and the guides may carry it, while the privacy policy, terms, contact and FAQ pages do not.
Ad code may be present on a page while an advertising account is under review, in which case nothing is displayed. Either way it does not change how the tools themselves process your input: the advertising and the tool are separate, and no content you type or drop into a tool is available to an advertiser.
We take a minimal-data approach — see the Privacy Policy for the details on cookies, advertising, and what little information the site handles. The short version: the tools do not send your content anywhere, the site records ordinary web-server information about visits, and the advertising network sets its own cookies unless you decline them.