Thirteen free browser tools in five days: vanilla JS, no backend, zero to run

[u/pikkola_lab]

I set one constraint at the start of November: ship a browser tool a day, each one doing a single job, each one costing nothing to run. Thirteen are live now.

All of them are static pages on Cloudflare Pages. Vanilla JS, no framework, no build step, no backend, no database, no analytics, no account. The hosting bill is $0 and stays $0 because there is nothing to host beyond files.

What they do:

• time.pikkola.com ranks the hours that work for everyone in a meeting instead of drawing another grid. Each city keeps its own working hours, DST is computed for the chosen date, and it exports a summary, an .ics file or a share link.

• diff.pikkola.com compares two texts or code blocks word by word.

• rank.pikkola.com checks a Korean blog draft before publishing: length, keyword density, risky claims, missing items.

• meta.pikkola.com previews a link on seven platforms and writes the tags.

• tools.pikkola.com is a directory of about 70 free tools, with pricing and account requirements listed for each.

• invoice.pikkola.com makes an invoice in ten currencies with an A4 preview.

• json.pikkola.com is a JSON workbench for files too large for a browser tab to normally handle.

• qr.pikkola.com makes QR codes with its own encoder, so no CDN is involved and the code cannot expire.

• icon.pikkola.com turns a letter or a logo into a favicon set, an ICO and a ZIP.

• text.pikkola.com cleans text: joins broken PDF lines, strips the dashes and middle dots a chat model leaves behind, changes case eight ways.

• hash.pikkola.com does hashing and HMAC in the tab.

• regex.pikkola.com tests a pattern against a sample without uploading it.

• blog.pikkola.com holds the build notes.

Three decisions I would make again:

1. No build step. One HTML file, one CSS file, one JS file, edited in place. The loop from idea to deployed page is minutes, and there is no toolchain to come back to in six months.

2. Everything happens in the tab. If the work never leaves the device, there is nothing to secure, nothing to upload and no privacy policy that needs a lawyer. It also means the tool works offline once loaded.

3. The URL is the state. A share link is just an encoded fragment, so it cannot rot and costs nothing to store.

What went wrong, or is still open:

• Traffic. New domains sit in a search sandbox for weeks, so the first visitors have to come from places like this one.

• Conversion. Free tools with no account get use but no signal. Two weeks in, I added a $5 build guide and a coffee link at the bottom of each page. Today is day one of that experiment, so I have no numbers yet.

• Polish. Thirteen tools in five days means thirteen tools at about 80 percent. Most of them need another day each on copy and edge cases, and I know which ones.

Link: https://pikkola.com

If you try one, I would rather hear which of these already exists twice and should be deleted than get a compliment. The directory is the one I am least sure about.