About Toolsy

Free developer tools that stay open in a tab.

What this site is

Toolsy is a collection of 95+ developer tools — JSON formatters, JWT decoders, cron explainers, regex testers, SSL inspectors, email auth checkers, and dozens of others. Every tool is free, runs in your browser whenever possible, requires no signup, and respects your data.

It started as a personal frustration: developers keep dozens of tabs open across half a dozen different tool sites, each with its own design, ads, paywalls, and tracking. The tools themselves are usually small — five hundred lines of JavaScript wrapping a well-known library — but they're hosted on bloated pages full of pop-ups, registration walls, and "premium" CTAs. We wanted one clean place to put the tools we actually use every day.

How tools get built

Every tool on Toolsy is built around the same principles:

• Client-side first. If a tool can run in your browser without sending data to a server, it does. JSON formatting, hashing, regex testing, color conversion, image manipulation — all of it happens locally. Open DevTools → Network tab and you'll see no requests when you use these tools.
• Server-side only when necessary. Some tools need server resources — DNS lookups, certificate parsing, code formatting libraries too heavy to load in a browser. When we use a server, the route is rate-limited and we don't log inputs.
• Real documentation alongside the tool. Every tool page has a long-form explanation of what the tool does, the common pitfalls, the standards it implements, and the situations where you'd use something else. We want you to leave understanding the topic, not just having pressed a button.
• No registration. No paywall. No premium tier. Every feature works without signing in. We're funded by the sponsored banner you sometimes see at the top of a tool page, and that's it.

Our take on privacy

The internet's default monetization model — surveillance advertising — is bad for users and getting worse. Most "free" developer tools track your inputs, sell aggregate data, fingerprint your browser, and quietly upload everything you paste into them. Toolsy doesn't do that, and we've made architectural decisions to keep it that way.

Concretely: tools that can run in your browser do run in your browser. You can verify this by watching the Network tab in DevTools. We don't store the JSON you format, the JWTs you decode, or the certificates you parse. Our analytics is request-level only — what page was loaded, country/region from edge headers — not content-level. We don't use Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, or any other third-party trackers.

Read our privacy policy for the specifics. It's short, written in plain English, and was drafted by an actual person, not a template generator.

How we make decisions

Adding a tool isn't free — every tool we ship is one more page to maintain, one more piece of UI a user has to learn, one more SEO surface that has to stand up to scrutiny. We say no to a lot of suggestions. The bar:

• Does it solve a real, recurring developer problem? Tools we use ourselves, or that users repeatedly request.
• Can we build the best free version of this tool? If a definitive free version already exists, we won't build a worse copy.
• Will the page have substantive content? Not just a UI — also the documentation, examples, and edge cases that make the tool a complete reference for the topic.
• Does it fit the brand? Toolsy is developer-focused. We're not adding mortgage calculators or recipe converters.

We publish what we're working on in the roadmap, what we've shipped recently in the changelog, and you can suggest tools by emailing hello@toolsy.website. Real requests with specific use cases tend to jump the queue.

Who runs this

Toolsy is built and maintained by a small independent team. We are working developers ourselves; everything on the site is something we use or wish existed. We are not VC-funded, not a stealth-mode startup, and not building toward an exit. The goal is to make Toolsy genuinely useful, sustain it through honest monetization, and keep it around for years.

You can reach us at hello@toolsy.website. We read every message. For ongoing discussions, see the changelog for our recent work, the roadmap for what's next, and the blog for longer-form writing on developer topics.

A short philosophy of tools

A good tool is a small thing that does one job clearly and stays out of your way. Most utility software stopped being that decades ago. Phone settings menus have nineteen levels of nesting. Trivially simple tasks (rename a file, find a word in a document) take three clicks and a forced sign-in to a cloud service. "Free" tools demand your email, your project metadata, sometimes your phone number.

The web was supposed to be different — small focused pages, fast to load, immediately useful — and for a while it was. Most "free dev tools" sites today aren't. They're CRM funnels with a tool grafted on top. We think there's room for utility software that just does the thing.

If you've ever opened five tabs to format some JSON, decode a JWT, check a regex, parse a curl command, and validate an SPF record — and gotten interrupted by a cookie banner, a newsletter pop-up, and a "try the premium version" modal in each — Toolsy is built for you.

What's next

We're shipping new tools roughly weekly. We're publishing a blog with deep-dive technical writing on the standards behind the tools (JWT, JSON Schema, cron, DNS, email authentication). We're improving search and discoverability so the right tool is one ⌘K (or Ctrl+K) away. And we're refining the existing tools based on what users actually do with them.

If you found Toolsy useful, the highest-leverage thing you can do is mention it the next time someone asks for a JSON formatter, a JWT decoder, or "is there a good tool for X". Word of mouth from developers is what built every utility site that's stayed alive long-term, and it's how we'd like Toolsy to grow.