The web has become exhausting. I’m building the opposite.

Antonio Manuel — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 20:43:46 +0000

Yesterday I wanted to compress an image.

Not edit it with AI.
Not enhance it.
Not remove the background.

Just… compress it.

Five minutes later, I had:

Accepted a cookie banner
Closed two pop-ups
Rejected browser notifications
Been asked to create an account
Seen a “Start your free trial” button
Uploaded my file to a server I know nothing about

For a task that should have taken 10 seconds!

Somewhere along the way, we stopped building websites that simply solved problems.

Everything became an acquisition funnel.
Everything became another SaaS.
Everything wanted my email before proving its value.

I don’t think the web was supposed to work like this.
So instead of building another subscription product, I decided to build something much simpler.

A different philosophy

PixMidas isn’t trying to become the next unicorn.
It’s an attempt to make the web feel useful again.

The idea is simple:

Open the website.
Use the tool.
Close the tab.
Move on with your day.

No account.
No subscription.
No unnecessary complexity.
No waiting!

For almost every tool, your files never leave your device because everything runs directly inside the browser using client-side JavaScript, Canvas APIs, WebAssembly, and libraries like pdf-lib. There is no backend processing, no database storing your files, and no hidden upload happening in the background.

Building software that disappears

The biggest lesson from building more than 30 browser tools wasn’t technical.

It was philosophical.

Good software shouldn’t demand attention.
It shouldn’t make users learn a new workflow.

It shouldn’t try to keep people inside your product for as long as possible.

Sometimes the best software is the software you forget you even used.

Open. Use. Done!

The hardest part isn’t building.

Ironically, building the tools wasn’t the difficult part.

Distribution is.

Google is already dominated by huge companies with massive SEO budgets. Every search for “compress image” or “merge PDF” is incredibly competitive, regardless of whether your product is better.

That’s the challenge I’m trying to solve now.
I’d love your opinion.

As developers, we’ve all watched the web become increasingly complex over the last decade.

Do you think we’ve over-engineered simple tasks?

And if you launched a completely free product today, with a low marketing budget, how would you get your first 10,000 users?

I’d genuinely love to hear your thoughts.

⸻

PixMidas: https://www.pixmidas.com

DEV Community: Antonio Manuel

The web has become exhausting. I’m building the opposite.