DEV Community: Hamza Ali Basra

Stop Uploading Your Files to Random Converters — and Stop Guessing What AI Tools Cost

Hamza Ali Basra — Sat, 07 Nov 2026 09:33:27 +0000

Two small frustrations eat more time than they should.

The first: a five-second file job — turning a WebP image into a JPG, making a favicon, working out the days between two dates — turns into an upload queue on some converter site, a signup wall, or your file sitting on a stranger's server.

The second: you subscribe to an AI tool at one price, and three months later the pricing page has quietly changed. Or you pay for a tool without ever checking the two alternatives that would have done the same job for less.

I build tools for both problems. This post is the practical version: what to do differently, with the tools I made as the worked examples. Full disclosure up front: both sites below are mine.

Part 1 — File jobs your browser can finish alone

Modern browsers are powerful enough to convert images, build icons and process PDFs locally. When a tool runs in your browser, your file never leaves your device — no upload, no server copy, nothing to leak or be kept.

The WebP problem. WebP is everywhere now, but plenty of editors, CMSs and older apps still refuse it. The fix I use daily is a WebP to JPG converter that converts in the browser tab itself. Drop the file, download the JPG. Nothing is uploaded, so it works the same for a screenshot or a client's confidential mockup.

The favicon problem. A real favicon isn't one PNG — browsers want a multi-size .ico file, and Google's own favicon fetcher only accepts raster formats (ICO/PNG), not SVG. So a site with only an SVG favicon can look broken in search results while looking fine in the browser. A PNG to ICO converter that packs the standard sizes (16, 32, 48) into one .ico file solves it in one step. It is one of the most-used tools on the whole site, which tells you how common this papercut is.

Date math. Deadline gaps, contract lengths, ages for forms — date arithmetic is where spreadsheets quietly produce off-by-one errors. A dedicated date calculator for days-between-dates, and an age difference calculator for the two-birthdate version, remove the mental gymnastics.

PDF jobs. The same logic applies to the classic trio — merge, split, compress. People upload contracts, ID scans and signed agreements to free PDF sites every day without a second thought, even though the merge itself is simple enough for a browser tab to do alone. If a tool asks you to upload a sensitive document for a job your own device can finish, that's a habit worth breaking.

The pattern behind all of these: ToolPixi is a set of 106 free tools — image converters, PDF tools, calculators — that run locally in your browser. No accounts, no uploads. The pitch is one line: your files never leave your device.

Part 2 — Check the real price before you subscribe to an AI tool

AI tools reprice constantly. Plans get renamed, free tiers shrink, entry prices move. A review written six months ago may be describing a pricing page that no longer exists — I know, because I run a system that re-checks the entry price of every tool in my directory daily, and changes show up constantly.

Before paying for any AI tool, run this three-step check:

Verify the current entry price on a source that was checked recently, not a launch-week blog post.
Read the alternatives page, not just the review. If a tool disappoints or outgrows your budget, you want the two or three closest swaps already compared. For example, the Dageno alternatives page exists because people search for exactly that when a tool stops fitting.
Total the stack, not the tool. One subscription looks cheap; five look different. An AI cost calculator that adds up your whole monthly stack is a sobering five minutes — most people find at least one tool they're paying for and barely using.

Fast-moving categories make this worse. AI video is the extreme case: models and prices change monthly, which is why pages like the Kling 4.0 overview need constant maintenance to stay honest.

What does the daily check actually catch? Entry plans renamed or quietly repriced. Free tiers that shrink from "generous" to "demo." Tools whose cheapest paid plan jumps a tier the month after every review site recommends them. None of this is scandalous — it's a young market repricing itself in public — but it means the only price worth trusting is the one verified recently, ideally today.

That directory is Grab AI Tool — 540+ AI tools, each with its entry paid-plan price kept current by a daily check, plus alternatives for when the first choice is wrong.

The short version

If a file job can be done locally, do it locally — your files stay yours.
If an AI tool wants your money monthly, spend five minutes checking today's price, its alternatives, and your total stack first.

Both sites are free to use. I build them solo and read every piece of feedback: contact@hamzaalibasra.com.

— Hamza Ali Basra, Founder of Grab AI Tool, ToolPixi & DailyWallPix

I built a free wallpaper library — DailyWallPix is live on Product Hunt today

Hamza Ali Basra — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 09:22:50 +0000

I built DailyWallPix because finding a clean, high-quality wallpaper always meant pop-ups, watermarks, or a paywall at the last step.

So I made the library I wanted myself: 2,200+ free HD wallpapers for phone and desktop, organized by category, color, style and device. Every download is one tap — no signup, no watermark. New wallpapers go up every single day.

Today DailyWallPix launched on Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/products/dailywallpix

The site itself: https://dailywallpix.com

I'd love feedback: which categories should I add next, and what would make this your go-to wallpaper site?

I built 75 free tools that refuse to upload your files

Hamza Ali Basra — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 15:07:48 +0000

Here is a small ritual you probably know.

You need to compress one PDF. Or shrink one photo. You search, you click the first result, you drag your file onto a stranger's server, you make an account you will never use again, you wait – and then the download button asks for money.

I got tired of performing that ritual with documents that had no business being on someone else's server in the first place. A signed agreement. A scan of an ID. Family photos. So I built the version I wanted to exist: ToolPixi – 75 free tools that run entirely in your browser. Your files never leave your device, because technically, they can't. There is no upload endpoint to send them to.

This post is about why I built it that way, what I put in it, and what building 70 tiny tools taught me that building one big one wouldn't have.

The privacy thing is an architecture decision, not a promise

Every hosted file tool asks you to trust a privacy policy. Policies are words. Architecture is physics.

When a tool runs client-side – the browser reads the file with the File API, processes it in JavaScript, and hands you back a download generated on your own machine – there is nothing to trust. No request carries your file anywhere. You can open the network tab and watch: the only thing that loads is the page itself.

That constraint shaped everything. Some operations are easy in a browser (merging and splitting PDFs, re-encoding images on a canvas, conversions between everyday formats). Some are genuinely awkward – the browser gives you no filesystem, memory is not infinite, and a huge file will humble a phone quickly. But the awkwardness is the point. The moment you add a server "just for the big files," you have rebuilt the exact thing you are trying to replace.

So the rule stayed absolute: if a tool can't run fully in the browser, it doesn't go on the site.

What's actually in the box

Seventy tools sounds like a lot until you list the small annoyances of a normal week:

PDF tools – merge, split, compress, convert, add page numbers. The unglamorous workhorses.
Image tools – a compressor, a resizer, and format converters (AVIF to JPG is the one that saves people from "why won't this file open" more than any other I made).
Converters – the odd format translations you need once and resent installing software for.
Calculators – age, dates, business days, BMI, calories, compound interest. Boring. Opened constantly.

My own most-opened tabs are the image compressor and the PDF compressor, in that order, most weeks. Not because they're clever – because sending a too-big attachment is a problem I personally have all the time. I suspect that's the entire secret of tools like these: the frequency of the annoyance matters more than the cleverness of the solution.

Lessons from building 70 small things instead of one big thing

1. Boring beats novel. Nobody wakes up excited about a date calculator. But "days between dates" is a question thousands of people type into Google every single day, in the exact moment they need the answer. A tool that answers in two seconds, with no sign-up wall, wins that moment against software ten times more powerful.

2. The last click is the product. Every incumbent I was frustrated with did the actual work fine – then held the result hostage at the download step. That final click is where trust is won or lost. On ToolPixi the download is just a download. Users remember who didn't mug them at the exit.

3. No account is a feature people can feel. I can't offer sync, history, or saved files – the architecture forbids it. I thought that would hurt more than it does. What I hear back instead, when people write in, is relief. In 2026, "we literally cannot see your file" lands harder than any feature list.

4. Maintenance is the real project. Seventy tools means seventy small things that can break when a browser changes behaviour, a library updates, or an edge-case file shows up with a format quirk I didn't test. Launching was a weekend-shaped problem. Owning the thing is a forever-shaped one. If you're starting something similar, budget your enthusiasm accordingly: most of the work is unglamorous fixing, and the fixing is what makes it trustworthy.

5. Ship the set, not the masterpiece. Each individual tool is almost embarrassingly simple. The value is the shelf – one bookmark that covers the whole category of "small file annoyance," so nobody has to go back to the upload-and-paywall ritual for the next one.

What I'd do differently

I'd start with the calculators. Seriously. They're the fastest to build, they answer questions people are already asking search engines, and they taught me how people actually arrive at a tool site: not through a homepage, but sideways, from a search result, straight into the one tool they need. Design for that arrival – tool first, brand later – from day one instead of learning it the slow way.

I'd also write the "your file never leaves your device" line into the design from the first sketch, not as a headline I added later. It's on the homepage now – "70 free browser tools. Your files never leave your device." – because it's the whole idea in one sentence, and everything else is implementation detail.

The other thing I run

ToolPixi isn't my only project. I also run Grab AI Tool, a directory of AI tools with the prices printed on the listings – same philosophy, different problem: be the page I wished existed, charge nothing, and don't hold the useful part hostage. Building both has convinced me the philosophy travels. Whatever you're making, there's a version of it that respects the person using it a little more than the incumbents do. That version is usually buildable. It's often even simpler. It's just rarely the default.

If you want to try the tools, they're at toolpixi.com – no account, obviously. And if you build browser-only tools too, I genuinely want to hear what you did about the big-file problem, because I still don't have an answer I'm proud of.

— Hamza Ali Basra, entrepreneur

I built 74 free tools that run entirely in the browser — no uploads, no signup

Hamza Ali Basra — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 16:56:58 +0000

Every day, people upload private files — contracts, payslips, family photos — to random websites just to merge a PDF or shrink an image. I kept thinking: the browser can already do all of this locally. So I built ToolPixi: 74 free tools that run entirely on your device.

The collection covers the everyday jobs: PDF merge, split and compress; image compress-to-KB (useful for forms that demand an exact file size), converters between JPG, PNG and WEBP; a QR code generator; and calculators for dates, ages, percentages and more.

How it works, technically:

Everything is client-side. PDFs are assembled with JavaScript libraries in the page; images are drawn to a canvas and re-encoded at the size you choose. Your file never travels to a server — there is no upload step to remove, it simply never happens.

Static hosting. The site is plain HTML/CSS/JS on GitHub Pages. No backend means no database of user files exists anywhere, which is the strongest privacy policy a tools site can have.

One page per tool. Every tool has its own URL with its own explanation, which is how people actually search ('compress image to 50kb', 'merge pdf').

The trade-off of client-side processing is that very large files depend on the visitor's device — a fair price for never handing your documents to a stranger's server.

All 74 tools are free, no signup, no watermarks: https://toolpixi.com

I built a free directory of 86 AI tools — here's how it's organized (and what I'd do differently)

Hamza Ali Basra — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 16:56:10 +0000

There are thousands of AI tools now, and most directories are either scraped lists or pay-to-rank ads. I wanted something simpler: a free directory where every entry is actually checked.

Grab AI Tool (https://grabaitool.com) lists 86 AI tools across 10 categories — writing, image, video, audio, code, design, marketing, and more. For every tool I record the things people actually ask before signing up: what the free plan really includes, where it stops, and what the paid plan costs. Those notes are checked and updated regularly, because pricing pages change constantly.

Three parts of the build were worth the effort:

The Finder Quiz. Instead of browsing categories, visitors answer a few questions about their task and get matched to a tool in about a minute. It is the most-used page on the site.

The Cost Calculator. AI subscriptions quietly add up. The calculator lets you stack the tools you pay for and see the real monthly total before renewing anything.

Boring tech, on purpose. The whole site is static — generated from structured data files, hosted on GitHub Pages. No database, no server costs, pages load instantly. When a price changes, I update one data entry and regenerate.

What I would do differently: start the quiz on day one instead of adding it later, and write the pricing-check routine before the list grew past 50 tools — checking 86 entries by hand teaches you that lesson fast.

The directory is free, no signup: https://grabaitool.com — if you try the quiz, I would genuinely like to know if the match it picked was the right one.