I Built Free Developer Tools That Respect Your Privacy

#webdev #python #privacy #tools

I Built Free Developer Tools That Respect Your Privacy

Every developer has that moment. You need to check your public IP, so you Google "what is my IP" and land on a page with 47 ads, three cookie banners, and a privacy policy that reads like a confession. Or you need a quick WHOIS lookup and somehow end up creating an account just to see who registered a domain.

I got tired of it. So I built two tools that do the job without the nonsense.

Tool #1: MyIP — Your IP, Nothing Else

🔗 myip.blunek.services

A retro terminal-style IP checker. Open it in a browser and you get your IP address, approximate location, and ISP displayed in a clean terminal aesthetic.

But the real power is in the terminal:

$ curl myip.blunek.services

That's it. Your IP, location, and ISP. Readable, fast, done.

API Endpoints

# Human-readable format
curl myip.blunek.services

# Structured JSON (great for scripts)
curl myip.blunek.services/json

# Just the raw IP (perfect for variable assignment)
curl myip.blunek.services/plain

Real-World Usage

I use the /plain endpoint constantly:

# Store your current IP
MY_IP=$(curl -s myip.blunek.services/plain)

# Quick check during SSH sessions
alias myip='curl -s myip.blunek.services'

The JSON endpoint returns everything you'd want for automation:

{
  "ip": "203.0.113.42",
  "city": "Berlin",
  "country": "Germany",
  "isp": "Example ISP",
  "lat": 52.52,
  "lon": 13.405
}

Tool #2: WHOIS Lookup — Domain Intelligence

🔗 whois.blunek.services

This one packs more punch. It's a domain intelligence tool that combines four things I always needed separate tabs for:

WHOIS Lookup

Type a domain, get registration details. Registrar, creation date, expiry, nameservers — the usual, but presented cleanly.

DNS Records

View A, AAAA, MX, TXT, CNAME, and NS records at a glance. Invaluable when debugging DNS propagation or verifying configuration changes.

SSL Certificate Checker

See certificate details, expiry dates, the full chain, and the issuer. Know exactly when your cert is going to expire before your monitoring catches it (or doesn't).

Email Security (SPF/DMARC)

This is the one that's saved me the most time. Check any domain's SPF and DMARC records to troubleshoot email delivery issues. If you've ever spent an afternoon figuring out why emails from your domain land in spam, you know the pain.

The UI is intentionally simple — Google-inspired, type a domain, pick what you want to check. No clutter.

The "Why": Privacy as a Feature

Here's what these tools don't do:

❌ No analytics (not even "privacy-friendly" ones)
❌ No cookies
❌ No user accounts
❌ No ads
❌ No tracking pixels
❌ No data selling
❌ No "sign up for more lookups" gates

Here's what they do:

✅ Answer your question
✅ Fast
✅ Free

That's the entire product philosophy. A tool should do what it says and get out of the way.

The Technical Bits

Both tools are built with FastAPI (Python). I chose it for a few reasons:

Speed — async by default, responses in milliseconds
Simplicity — the codebase stays small and maintainable
API-first — FastAPI makes it natural to build the API endpoint first and the web UI second

The CLI-first philosophy is important to me. MyIP was designed as an API that happens to have a web interface, not the other way around. If curl can use it, it's doing its job.

Both services are hosted in the EU (Europe), which means GDPR compliance isn't an afterthought — it's the default. When you don't collect data, privacy regulations are easy.

CLI-First Philosophy

There's something elegant about a tool you can use without leaving your terminal. The web UI is nice for quick one-off checks, but the real workflow is:

# Am I behind VPN right now?
curl -s myip.blunek.services/plain

# What's the MX for this client's domain?
# (use the web UI for this one — it's visual)

I think developer tools should meet developers where they are. And developers are in their terminal.

What's Next

These tools are part of blünek, where I'm building a suite of developer and infrastructure tools. The philosophy stays the same: useful, fast, private, and as free as possible.

If you have feedback or ideas for what to build next, I'd genuinely love to hear it. These tools were born from my own frustrations — yours might spark the next one.

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