Every few weeks I hit the same small wall.
I need to know what 0 3 * * 1 actually means. Or how many bags of concrete 2.4 m³ is. Or what
£150 a month turns into at 6% over fifteen years. Nothing hard — just a question that should take
ten seconds to answer.
And every time, the same routine: land on a site that wants an account, or pushes my numbers to a
server, or is more ad than page.
So I started collecting the answers I kept needing as single static pages. That collection is now
45 tools, and it lives here: https://1024toolkit.com
The constraint I set myself
One rule shaped everything else: a tool must answer one question, and it must work without me.
That meant:
- No account. Nothing to sign up for, nothing to remember, nothing to reset.
- Nothing you type is stored. Whatever you enter stays in the tab. (A couple of tools need live data — the stock lookup, for instance — and fetch it through a thin proxy. Nothing you type is saved there either.)
- One question per page. If a tool needs a manual, it is the wrong tool.
The discipline of "one question per page" sounds limiting. In practice it is the opposite — it
makes every addition obvious. Either the tool collapses into a single input and a single result,
or it does not belong.
What's in there
45 tools, in four loose clusters plus a long tail of everyday ones:
- Finance — compound interest, savings-rate, discount, options payoff, position sizing
- Engineering — concrete volume, cut lists, triangle geometry, great-circle distance
- Health — BMI, BMR, TDEE, heart-rate zones, A1C
- Developer utilities — cron, regex, timestamps, time zones, subnets, SQL formatting, mock data
The developer ones are the reason I started. I got tired of opening a heavyweight site to decode a
cron string I was staring at anyway.
The whole site is also available in four languages (English, German, Japanese and Simplified
Chinese), which turned out to be far less work than expected once the tools were small enough.
What I would tell someone starting the same thing
1. Ship the boring version first. A page with an input, a label and a result is a legitimate
tool. I have talked myself out of more tools by planning a "proper" version than by any other means.
2. Name the tool the way people search for it. "Cron expression parser" beats "TimeKit" every
single time. The name is the feature.
3. Almost no backend is a feature, not a shortcut. Every server you do not run is a data breach
you cannot have, a bill you do not pay, and a page that keeps working when something upstream is
down. The handful of endpoints I do run exist only to keep an API key off the client — never to hold
your data.
The honest part
These are small tools. None of them is clever. The value is that they are there, they load
instantly, and they never ask for anything.
If you use one and it is missing an input you need, or the answer is wrong, I would genuinely like
to know — that is the most useful feedback I can get.
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