I ship 135 free tools that never upload your file — as a static site

I build ToolsByUs, a suite of 135 free browser tools for JSON, PDF, images, video, audio, and text. There is no account, and no server endpoint waiting to receive your file. That last part is the whole design decision — and it shapes everything else about how the site is built.

The rule is narrow, on purpose: your file's contents never leave the browser. The tool runs in your tab, on your machine. That is different from the usual promise of "we delete your files after processing." There is nothing to delete, because the contents were never sent.

A worked example, with a tool you can try in seconds: the JSON Formatter. Paste this on one line:

{"zip":90210,"name":"Ada","active":true,"tools":["json","pdf"]}

Format it with 2-space indent and key sorting, and you get readable, deterministic output — same input, same output, no round-trip:

{
  "active": true,
  "name": "Ada",
  "tools": [
    "json",
    "pdf"
  ],
  "zip": 90210
}

Nothing about that example is special, and that is the point. The formatter, the JSON Schema Generator (it infers Draft 2020-12 schemas from a sample payload), the regex tester, and the JWT decoder all work the same way: paste, process locally, copy the result.

The surprising part is not the formatter. It is the Background Remover. It runs a neural network locally in the browser, via ONNX inference, and returns a transparent PNG — again without uploading the image. A model running in a tab feels like it should need a server. It does not; the cost is paid once, on your machine, when the model loads.

Why a static site? Because a static export cannot quietly gain an upload endpoint later without someone noticing the architecture changed. The site ships in six locales (English, Spanish, German, French, Portuguese, Japanese), with 12 guides and a public changelog, from the same static build. The count breaks down honestly: 113 standard tools plus 22 creator tools, for 135 in total.

Honest caveats — because "private by architecture" still has edges:

• Client-side does not mean "no network at all." Your browser still fetches the page itself, and the site notes analytics is configured separately. The guarantee is about file contents, not about every byte your browser exchanges.
• Heavy work is bounded by your machine. A very large PDF or image will be slower, and can hit browser memory limits, where a server would just throw more hardware at it.
• The background-removal model has to load first. The first run is slower than later runs.
• No account means no sync and no saved history. That is a trade-off, not just a feature.
• I am not claiming this is open source, and I am not promising "free forever." The site says all tools are free today; that is the claim I can stand behind.

If you work with contracts, payslips, or medical records — the exact cases the Merge PDF page names — the question is not whether you trust a vendor's deletion policy. It is whether your file ever needed to leave your browser at all.

You can try the full suite at ToolsByUs: https://toolsbyus.com — 135 free tools, no signup, file contents processed in your browser.