Suggest a tool

Tell us what you need — we will try to build it and get back to you.

If you can think of a free browser tool that would help you, describe it below. Include your name and email so we can contact you. We cannot promise every idea ships, but we read every request and prioritise clear, widely useful tools that fit ToolsAre.Us.

We use your name and email only to reply about this suggestion. See the Privacy Policy.

What makes a suggestion easy to act on

The suggestions that get built are the ones we can picture immediately. That usually means three things are clear: what goes in, what comes out, and what you are doing at the moment you would reach for it. "A better calculator" is hard to act on. "I get CSV exports from our warehouse system and need to strip the duplicate rows before I import them" describes a job, and a job is something a tool can be shaped around.

Real examples help more than descriptions do. If you can paste two lines of the data you start with and two lines of what you wish came out the other end, that is worth several paragraphs of explanation. The same goes for file types: "a PDF" and "a scanned PDF of a photocopied form" are very different problems, and knowing which one you have changes what gets built.

It is also worth saying how often you do this. Something you do twice a year is rarely worth a tool; something you do every Monday morning almost always is, even if it sounds trivial. Frequency is the strongest signal we get about whether an idea will help anyone besides the person who suggested it.

What tends to fit this site

Every tool here runs in your own browser, without an account, and most of them work with the network disconnected once the page has loaded. Ideas that fit that shape are the ones that ship quickest: converting between formats, cleaning up text, resizing or compressing files, generating something from an input, checking a list off, or timing and counting things. If a tool could plausibly work on a laptop on a train, it fits.

Small and specific beats large and general. A tool that does one job properly is more likely to be built — and more likely to be used — than a suite that does nine jobs adequately. Several of the tools here started as one narrow request and stayed narrow on purpose.

What usually does not fit

Anything that needs a paid third-party service behind it is difficult, because the cost lands on us every time someone uses it. So is anything that requires user accounts, since there are no accounts here and adding them would change the privacy position that most of these tools are built on.

Ideas that need your files stored on a server long term are also a poor fit — the handful of tools that do store anything (countdowns, RSVPs, watch rooms) store the minimum needed to share a link, and that is deliberate. Heavy processing that would take a server farm rather than a browser tab is out for the same reason. None of this means the idea is bad; it means it belongs somewhere other than here.

Check what already exists first

A fair number of suggestions describe something that is already on the site under a name the person did not think to search for. Before sending, it is worth a look at the full tool list — the search box on that page matches common alternative names, so "zip", "dedupe" and "OCR" will find the relevant tool even when that is not what it is called. If something close exists but falls just short of what you need, say so: "the Image Compressor is nearly right but I need it to hit a specific file size" is one of the most useful kinds of message we get, and changes to an existing tool are far quicker than a new one.

What happens after you send it

Every suggestion is read. You will get a reply by email, usually within a few business days, saying whether it is something we expect to build, something we might build later, or something that does not fit — and if it is the last one, why. We would rather tell you plainly than leave you waiting on a tool that is never coming.

If it does get built, you will hear about it when it goes live. There is no obligation attached to that: the tools stay free, there is no account to make, and suggesting something does not sign you up for anything. We cannot promise a timeline, and ideas that need someone else's paid service or a rewrite of an existing tool take longer than small additions. For a bug in a tool that already exists, the contact page is the faster route.