We built free marketing calculators that show you the benchmark, not just the number

Bryn Byron — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 11:14:29 +0000

My partner and I kept running into the same wall trying to get a handle on our own marketing. You calculate your conversion rate, or your ROAS, or your email open rate, and you get a number. Then you sit there going: is that good? Bad? Normal? The number on its own tells you almost nothing without something to compare it against.

Most free calculators online stop at the number. So we built a set that doesn't.

It's called StatCalcs: https://statcalcs.com

The idea is that every calculator ships with a benchmark table next to it, so the moment you get your figure you can see roughly where it sits. And the benchmarks are the part we actually cared about getting right.
That turned out to be harder than the maths. The calculators themselves are trivial, it's arithmetic. The real work was the benchmarks, because "the average conversion rate is 2%" is the kind of number that gets copied around the internet with no source and no date until nobody knows where it came from. We didn't want to add to that pile.

The rule we set was that every benchmark has to name its source and its date, and say what it actually measured. The conversion rate figures, for instance, cite Ruler Analytics 2026 (5M+ tracked conversions), cross-referenced against First Page Sage's B2C numbers, and every table carries a "last reviewed" date so you can see how fresh it is. We also flag that Ruler is measuring lead-gen form fills and calls rather than ecommerce checkouts, because that distinction changes what a "good" number looks like. A 2% conversion rate means very different things for a B2B lead form versus a shoe shop.

That last part is the bit we think matters most. A benchmark with no context can quietly mislead you, which is worse than having none, because it hands you false confidence. "Average is X" is meaningless if your traffic is mostly cold paid social and the average was measured on warm email. The tables break the numbers down by channel and by industry where we could find data to back it, and where we couldn't, we left it out rather than guess.

What's in it right now: conversion rate, click-through rate, ROAS, engagement rate, email open rate, churn, average order value, and an ecommerce conversion rate breakdown by industry. All free, no sign-up, works on your phone.

If you use it and a benchmark looks out of date, or a formula looks off, tell us. We'd genuinely rather hear it than have a wrong number sitting there. Half the reason we're posting this is to get more eyes on the numbers.

I built 18 free text tools that run entirely in your browser — no server, no sign-up

Bryn Byron — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 10:27:17 +0000

Every few days I'd need to do something small and annoying to a bit of text. Convert it to binary. Strip weird formatting out of something I pasted. Wrap a string in JSON. And every time, the free online tool for it wanted me to clear a cookie wall first, or sat there reloading an ad, or made me paste text I didn't really want to hand over into a box that quietly POSTs it to someone's server.

So I built my own, and made them all run in the browser.
It's called ShifText: https://shiftext.com

The rule I set myself was that your text never leaves the page. Every tool does its work in JavaScript, right there in the browser. Nothing you type gets sent anywhere, there's no account, no upload, and once the page has loaded it keeps working offline.

That turned out to be less of a limitation than I expected. Case conversion, formatting, encoding like binary and hex and Caesar cipher, string-to-JSON, the various Unicode text generators, they're all just functions of their input. None of them actually need a server. A lot of "online tools" POST your text off to a backend and I'm fairly sure it's habit more than necessity.

The Unicode stuff was the part that ate my time. Small caps and strikethrough text aren't fonts, they're separate Unicode characters (or combining marks, in the strikethrough case), so building them means mapping every letter and then dealing with the letters Unicode just doesn't have an equivalent for. You end up making a lot of small judgement calls about what to do when there's no clean substitute.
On the privacy claim: I know "we respect your privacy" is worth nothing when everyone says it. The reason I trust the client-side version is that you can check it. The text processing happens on the page, so what you type doesn't go anywhere. There is analytics on the site, heatmaps mostly, so I can see which tools trip people up, but it's consent-gated, it respects Global Privacy Control, and the text you type is masked out before anything gets recorded. Turn it off or block it and everything still works.

Full list, roughly: the case tools (upper, lower, caps, capitalisation), a string formatter and a text formatter, string-to-JSON, binary translator, hex to text, a Caesar cipher tool, an HTML viewer, and then the text style generators, strikethrough, small caps, big text, cursed/zalgo, invisible text, wingdings.

It's free and there's nothing to sign up for. If you try it and something obvious is missing, tell me, I've mostly been adding tools based on what people say they actually reach for.

DEV Community: Bryn Byron

We built free marketing calculators that show you the benchmark, not just the number

I built 18 free text tools that run entirely in your browser — no server, no sign-up