It started with a JSON formatter.
I was sitting at my desk at 11 PM, pasting some messy API response into one of those "free online JSON tools" — and the page had 14 ads, two newsletter popups, and a cookie banner bigger than the actual text area. The JSON formatted fine. But I felt gross using it.
So I closed the tab, opened VS Code, and started writing a JSON formatter. No plan. No Notion doc. Just annoyance and caffeine.
How 1 tool became 500
I finished the formatter in maybe 2 hours. And then I thought — okay, I already have this FastAPI route and this Jinja2 template... what if I just add a JSON validator too? Same skeleton, different logic.
That's how it starts. You build one thing and suddenly you're going "well I need a YAML converter anyway for work" and "Base64 encoder would take like 20 minutes" and before you know it you've got 50 of these things.
I hit 100 and genuinely lost count for a few days.
The setup is dead simple. Python route, Jinja2 template, vanilla JS doing the actual work in the browser. Your data never hits my server — not because I had some grand privacy philosophy, but because processing stuff client-side meant I didn't have to worry about server load or storage. Lazy architecture choices that accidentally became a feature.
The parts that sucked
Okay so Google basically pretends my site doesn't exist. 500+ pages, fresh domain, zero backlinks — I submitted my sitemap and... nothing. Like 7 pages indexed out of 500+. That's not a rounding error, that's Google telling you to go away.
Also some of my tools are rough. I'm not gonna pretend otherwise. The percentage calculator works but it looks like something from 2009. I went wide instead of deep and some pages show it.
The thing nobody tells you about building 500 pages? The META DESCRIPTIONS. And OG tags. And making sure nothing breaks on mobile. I spent more time on that nonsense than actually writing code. Building tools = fun. SEO housekeeping = slow death.
Oh and I'm on Render's free tier so the first person who visits after the site goes idle gets a 15-second cold start. They probably think the site is broken. It's not. It's just cheap.
Stuff I did NOT see coming
The kids math games page? Gets more traffic than my JSON formatter. I did not expect that at all. Apparently parents searching "free multiplication practice for kids" is a way bigger audience than devs looking for a regex tester. Who knew.
Also — I have 147 calculators. From ONE template. BMI, loan payments, tip calculator, compound interest, all of them. Same engine under the hood, just different config. The DRY principle taken to its logical extreme.
And the hash generators and encoding tools that I threw in because I needed to fill out the tools page? Those are getting actual usage. The filler content became the main content. I still don't fully understand why.
The stack (for the curious)
- Backend: Python + FastAPI
- Templates: Jinja2 (server-rendered HTML in 2026, yeah I know)
- Frontend: Vanilla JS, bit of Alpine.js where I needed reactivity
- Hosting: Render free tier
- Database: SQLite for the couple things that need state
- Cost: $0. Literally zero.
No React. No Next.js. No Vercel. A Python server spitting out HTML. Old school and it works fine.
Why I'm writing this now
I've been building in silence for a while and honestly? Nobody knows this thing exists. Google doesn't index it. I have no social presence. The tools work but they're sitting in a void.
So I'm trying something different — just writing about what I'm actually doing. What's working, what's broken, what I'm figuring out. No "10x your productivity" stuff. Just... here's what happened.
The whole thing is at nexuslabs.website if you want to poke around. Fair warning, some tools are polished and some look like a hackathon project at 4am. I'm working on it.
But real question — has anyone else done a sprint like this? Built a bunch of stuff in a short window and then had to figure out what to do with it all? What's the craziest thing you've built in under 2 weeks?
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