DEV Community: Toollium

How I Built a Client-Side PDF Compressor with Zero Server Uploads (WebAssembly + JS)

Toollium — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 09:15:20 +0000

It's genuinely useful → gets saved/shared/upvoted → more visibility → more organic links from people referencing it.
One contextual link, not a landing-page pitch → looks natural, less spammy.
Developers who read it may link to it from their own "cool WASM projects" roundups — a real backlink chain.

Other post ideas in the same vein (pick whichever tool you can explain technically):

"Building an AI Background Remover That Runs Fully On-Device" (background-remover)
"I Reverse-Engineered Why Free CV Builders All Look the Same — So I Built My Own Template Engine" (cv-builder)
"JWT Decoding in the Browser: What I Learned Building a Zero-Backend Decoder" (jwt-decoder

How I Built a Client-Side PDF Compressor with Zero Server Uploads (WebAssembly + JS)

Toollium — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 08:54:22 +0000

his works because:

Other post ideas in the same vein (pick whichever tool you can explain technically):

From 45 to 70 Free Tools — Toollium Just Got a Lot Bigger

Toollium — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 09:04:40 +0000

A few weeks ago I shared Toollium here — 45 free browser-based tools with no sign-up, no watermarks, and nothing uploaded to a server.

The response pushed me to keep going. Toollium is now at 70 tools, and I want to walk through what's new and why I built it this way.

The philosophy hasn't changed

Same three rules as before:

No sign-up, ever
No watermarks on anything you export
Files never leave your browser — conversion, compression, and editing all happen client-side

The only thing that's changed is scope.

What's new since the last 45

Developer tools — this category didn't exist before. Now there's a regex tester, JSON formatter, UUID generator, JWT decoder, Base64 encode/decode, URL encoder, hash generator, CSS minifier, a CSS gradient builder, an SVG viewer, and a subnet calculator. These came directly from things I kept opening random sites for myself.

Finance calculators — mortgage payments, debt payoff (snowball vs. avalanche), auto loans, life insurance coverage, compound interest, rent vs. buy, salary-to-hourly conversion, and sales tax by state. All calculation-only, nothing sold, no lead-gen forms.

Health calculators — a BMI calculator and a calorie (TDEE) calculator, both written with honest caveats instead of pretending a formula can replace a doctor.

More PDF converters — Excel to PDF, GIF to PDF, BMP to PDF, HEIC to PDF (for iPhone photos), ZIP to PDF (bulk images into one file), watermarking, page deletion, and page numbering.

More image tools — an image format converter, SVG to PNG, a signature maker, and a crop tool, on top of the compressor, resizer, and AI background remover from before.

New AI writing tools — an AI cover letter generator and an AI email writer, alongside the paraphraser, grammar checker, and summarizer.

Business utilities — an invoice generator, age calculator, EMI/loan calculator, unit converter, percentage calculator, date duration calculator, and a time zone converter.

Why keep adding instead of polishing 45

Two reasons.

First, the tools that get used most aren't glamorous — password generators and word counters get more traffic than the AI features. That told me breadth matters as much as depth for this kind of product.

Second, every tool runs the same architecture: process in-browser with WebAssembly or plain JS wherever possible, and only send data to a server when it genuinely can't be avoided (the AI writing tools send text for processing but store nothing). Adding a new tool is mostly a UI problem at this point, not an infrastructure one, so shipping fast made sense.

What stayed hard

The AI tools are the exception to "everything is free forever" — the background remover, paraphraser, grammar checker, and summarizer call external models, which costs real money per request. Keeping those free without ads or watermarks is the part I'm still figuring out long-term. If anyone here has run a similar product and found a sustainable model that doesn't compromise on the no-sign-up promise, I'd genuinely like to hear it.

Try it

Everything's live at toollium.com. If there's a specific tool you keep paying for elsewhere, tell me — that's usually how the next batch gets decided.

Toollium: A Simple Collection of Online Tools for Everyday Tasks

Toollium — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 07:07:37 +0000

In a world where we constantly need to convert files, generate text, calculate values, format data, or perform small tasks online, finding the right tool can sometimes take more time than actually doing the task.

That’s why I created Toollium — a collection of useful online tools designed to make everyday digital tasks faster and easier.

👉 Visit Toollium: https://toollium.com/

What is Toollium?

Toollium is an online tools platform built around a simple idea:

Find a tool, use it quickly, and get the job done.

Instead of searching through different websites whenever you need a small utility, Toollium aims to bring useful tools together in one convenient place.

Whether you're a developer, student, content creator, freelancer, marketer, or simply someone who works online, small utilities can save a surprising amount of time.

Why use online tools?

Many everyday tasks don't require complicated software.

Sometimes you just need to:

Convert or transform information
Calculate something quickly
Generate useful content
Format or process text
Work with files or data
Perform repetitive online tasks
Find a quick solution without installing software

Having these utilities available from your browser makes these tasks much more convenient.

Built for simplicity

The goal behind Toollium is not to make things complicated.

The idea is to create tools that are:

Easy to understand
Fast to access
Simple to use
Useful for everyday tasks
Available directly from your browser

No complicated setup — just open the tool and get started.

Give Toollium a Try

If you regularly use online utilities for work, study, development, content creation, or everyday tasks, you can explore Toollium and see whether it has something useful for you.

👉 Explore Toollium: https://toollium.com/

I'm continuing to improve the platform and add more useful tools over time. Feedback and suggestions are always welcome.

What small online tool do you use most often? Let me know in the comments.

Tool #63: Discover Your Next Favorite AI Tool

Toollium — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 08:28:00 +0000

Looking for the perfect AI tool to boost your productivity?

🚀 Tool #63 is now featured on Toollium—your go-to directory for discovering the best AI tools for developers, creators, marketers, students, and businesses.

✅ Curated AI tools
✅ Easy search & filtering
✅ Regularly updated listings
✅ Find the right tool in seconds

Explore now: https://toollium.com

63 Free Tools I Built So You Don't Have to Pay

Toollium — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 13:42:47 +0000

The problem

Every "free" PDF or writing tool online eventually hits you with the same wall: a watermark, a daily limit, a forced sign-up, or a paywall right when you actually need the feature. iLovePDF wants ~$8/month. QuillBot Premium runs up to ~$20/month. Grammarly Pro is ~$12/month. Remove.bg charges per image. None of that is unreasonable for a business — but for a one-off task (convert a PDF, fix a paragraph, cut a background), it's a lot of friction.

So I built Toollium — a single site with 63 free tools that run entirely in the browser. No account, no watermark, no daily cap.

What's actually in it

The tools are grouped into a few categories:

📄 PDF conversion & utilities
PDF ↔ Word, JPG ↔ PDF, HTML to PDF, Excel to PDF, plus compress, merge, split, rotate, and unlock.

🤖 AI writing
An AI paraphraser (5 styles, no word cap — QuillBot's free tier stops at 125 words), a grammar checker powered by LanguageTool, an AI summarizer, an AI cover letter generator, and an AI email writer.

🖼️ Image tools
A background remover that runs a WebAssembly AI model client-side (remove.bg charges per image for this), plus a compressor, resizer, format converter, SVG-to-PNG, crop tool, and signature maker.

⚡ Developer utilities
JSON formatter, regex tester, UUID generator, JWT decoder, Markdown-to-HTML, text diff checker, favicon generator, password generator, and QR code generator.

💰 Finance & everyday calculators
Mortgage, debt payoff, auto loan, compound interest, rent-vs-buy, salary-to-hourly, sales tax, EMI, plus BMI and calorie calculators.

📋 CV Builder
Upload a photo, pick from 4 templates, let AI draft your summary and bullet points, export an ATS-friendly PDF.

The part I actually care about: privacy

This is the design constraint that shaped everything else — processing happens in your browser, not on a server. PDFs aren't uploaded anywhere to be converted; the background remover's AI model runs client-side via WebAssembly. Nothing is stored, so there's nothing to leak, nothing to log, and nothing to delete later.

That's also why it can stay free — there's no server-side compute cost per file, so there's no meter to run.

Why free, no catch

I'm not running a freemium funnel here — there's no paid tier waiting behind a feature flag. The honest answer is that the browser-based architecture makes marginal cost per user close to zero, so it doesn't need one.

Try it

If you try it and hit something rough — a tool that misbehaves, a format it doesn't handle, a feature you wish existed — I'd genuinely like to hear about it in the comments. This is a small, actively-worked-on project, not a finished product I'm walking away from.

I Built 45+ Free Tools That Run Entirely in Your Browser — Here's Why

Toollium — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 10:56:47 +0000

Like a lot of people, I got tired of "free" online tools that:

Watermark your files unless you pay
Require sign-up just to convert a PDF
Upload your files to a server you know nothing about

So I built Toollium — a collection of 45+ tools that run entirely in your browser. Nothing gets uploaded anywhere.

What's included

PDF Convert — PDF ↔ Word, merge, split, compress
AI Image Tools — background removal, compression
CV Builder — AI-assisted resume writing
Finance Calculators — mortgage, compound interest, debt payoff, and more

No account. No watermark. No catch.

🔗 Try it: toollium.com

Would genuinely love feedback from this community — what would you want added next?