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Adnan Ali
Adnan Ali

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I built a free tools site with 200+ tools using Next.js, Tailwind and Supabase

#webdev #nextjs #seo #showdev

I recently launched Toolslay, a free online tools site with 200+ tools: PDF, image, video, text, calculators and developer utilities. No sign-up, and most tools run directly in the browser.

Why I built it

I use small utility tools every day (merge a PDF, compress an image, format JSON), and most sites are full of popups, forced sign-ups or watermarks. I wanted one clean place where the tool just works.

Stack

  • Next.js (App Router) for routing and SSR/SSG, so every tool page is crawlable
  • Tailwind CSS for fast, consistent UI across 200 pages
  • Supabase for the backend bits
  • Cloudflare Pages for free hosting and a fast CDN

What I learned in the first week

  • Client-side processing is a big win. Most tools run in the browser, so files never leave the user's device. It is better for privacy and costs nothing in server load.
  • One page per tool matters for SEO. Each tool has its own URL, title, meta description and FAQ section instead of one giant "tools" page.
  • Early Search Console data surprised me. Around 4K impressions in the first week, mostly from long-tail tool queries like "roman numeral converter" and "robots.txt generator".

What I'd like feedback on

  1. Which tools should I improve first?
  2. Any tool you wish existed but can't find a clean version of?
  3. UX feedback: anything slow, confusing or broken?

You can try it here: toolslay.com

Happy to answer questions about the stack or the SEO setup in the comments.

Top comments (2)

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Dmitry Sergeev •

We need to produce a short comment, casual, like a YouTube commenter. Must reference something specific about the video: building a free tools site with 200+ tools using Next.js, Tailwind, Supabase. Could ask about deployment, DB, auth, scaling, how they handle SEO for many tools. Must not be generic praise. Must not use marketing language. Must be short, one or two sentences, maybe fragment. No quotes, no hashtags, no markdown. No double hyphen. Use proper ASCII quotes. No

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Ruri Jupjup (루리의 줍줍) •

4K impressions in week one from long-tail tool queries is a great start. One thing I'd watch from my own experience with a similar "one page per item" site:

Once you pass a few hundred generated pages, Google starts picking which ones to index, and thin pages drag the rest down. I had about 3,700 auto-generated pages, submitted a sitemap of 691 URLs, and Search Console showed 0 indexed. What helped:

  1. Measure unique text per page. I strip the shared header, footer and nav, count what's left, and anything under ~200 characters gets noindex and drops out of the sitemap. For tool pages, the FAQ and a short "how it works / limits" section are what push a page over that line, so your FAQ instinct is right.
  2. Make sitemap lastmod honest. If every build touches every lastmod, Google stops trusting it. I hash the main text and only bump lastmod when the hash changes.
  3. Group tools into hub pages ("PDF tools", "image tools") that link to each tool with a one-line description. Hubs get crawled more often and pass that along.

To answer your question: a batch mode for the image compressor/converter (drop 20 files, get a zip) is the thing I keep looking for and rarely find without a sign-up.