I Got Tired Of Crappy Tool Sites, So I Built My Own (120+ Free Dev Tools)

Tyler Heinrichs — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 23:05:29 +0000

If you write code all day, you probably know this dance.

You’re in the middle of something, you just need to:

Decode a JWT

Pretty‑print some awful JSON

Test a regex

Convert a Unix timestamp

Encode or decode a URL / Base64 string

So you Google it, click the first result… and suddenly you’re dealing with:

Cookie banners

Newsletter pop‑ups

“Create an account to continue”

Four ads before you even see an input box

By the time the page settles down, you’ve forgotten what you were doing.

After running into that one too many times, I decided to build the kind of tool site I wished already existed. That turned into Tool Vault – a bundle of 120+ small tools that try very hard to stay out of your way:

👉 https://toolvault.co

No signup. No onboarding. Just paste, get what you need, and bail.

Why I Bothered Building This
This started as a “weekend thing” and quietly snowballed.

I kept noticing the same problems:

Simple tools felt heavy

Everything wanted my email

Half the sites fell apart on mobile

A lot of them shipped data to a backend for no good reason

So I gave myself a few rules:

Keep it fast. Pages should feel instant, even on bad Wi‑Fi.

Do as much as possible in the browser. If it can run locally, it does.

No accounts. I don’t need one more login and I’m guessing you don’t either.

Make it usable on a phone. Production issues don’t wait until you’re at your desk.

Once I had a couple of tools I actually used, it was hard to stop.

Some Of The Tools Developers Seem To Use Most
There are 120+ on the site now, but these are the ones people keep coming back to.

🔐 JWT Decoder
Paste a token, see what’s inside:

Header and payload decoded

Claims laid out clearly

All done in the browser, so you’re not sending tokens off to a random server

Good for “why is this request unauthorized?” moments.

🧾 JSON Formatter & Validator
For when your logs or API responses are just one giant line:

Formats JSON nicely

Points out syntax errors

Makes it easier to spot the weird field that’s breaking everything

🔤 HTML Entity Converter
Useful when you’re:

Copying content between a CMS and templates

Dealing with < / > / & everywhere

Cleaning up stuff that’s been escaped twice

You can go from entities → clean text or the other way around.

🧪 Regex Tester
Paste some sample text, try a pattern, see matches right away.

Nice when you want to experiment with:

Log scraping

Input validation

Quick “does this pattern make sense?” checks

Without touching your production code.

🔁 Base64 Encode / Decode
For when APIs decide to Base64 everything:

Encode text for headers / payloads

Decode blobs to see what’s actually going on

Nothing fancy, just quick and predictable.

🆔 UUID Generator
Click a button, get UUIDs. That’s it.

Handy for seed data, test IDs, or anywhere you need “random enough” identifiers without thinking about it.

⏰ Unix Timestamp Converter
Turn 1705075200 into a real date, and back again.

Good for sanity‑checking:

Logs

Schedules

“Is this seconds or milliseconds?” mysteries

🧮 Hash Generator
Generate MD5 / SHA‑1 / SHA‑256 / SHA‑512 hashes:

Quick file / string checks

Integrity checks when you’re moving data around

“Does this match what the other side is sending?”

Runs client‑side, so again, nothing leaves your browser.

📅 Cron Expression Helper
Cron syntax is one of those things you know… until you don’t.

Drop in an expression, and it tells you in plain language when it will actually run. Helpful when you don’t want a job firing at 3 AM every day by accident.

What I’m Trying To Do Differently
Plenty of sites offer similar tools. The whole point here isn’t that these tools are unique, it’s how they behave.

A few things I care about:

Low friction

No login wall

No “sign up to see your result”

No “create a project first”

Most pages put the cursor in the input box automatically so you can paste and get on with your day.

Local first

Whenever it’s safe and reasonable:

JWTs

Hashing

Encoding / decoding

Formatting

…all happen in your browser. That way, you’re not pushing sensitive strings through someone else’s backend just to inspect them.

Ads that don’t punch you in the face

There are ads (servers aren’t free), but the goal is:

Nothing over the tool itself

Nothing between input and output

Nothing that makes the page unusable on mobile

You should be able to actually use the thing on a small screen.

Real Situations Where It Helps
A few real‑world moments this was built for:

You’re on‑call, someone pastes a JWT or timestamp into Slack, and you’re checking it on your phone.

A third‑party API is double‑encoding things and you’re trying to untangle Base64 + HTML entities + weird JSON.

You’re working with data you’d rather not send to a random server.

You just want to check a cron string or hash and get back to your editor.

None of that is glamorous work. But it’s the glue that keeps everything else moving.

Want To Try It?
If you want a new set of “oh yeah, that site” tools to keep in your back pocket:

👉 Tool Vault — 120+ Free Tools & Calculators
https://toolvault.co

Pick a tool, see if it fits into your workflow. If it saves you a few tabs and a bit of frustration, then it’s doing its job.

I’d Genuinely Love Feedback
If you do give it a spin, I’d be interested in:

Which tools you’d actually bookmark

Anything annoying or confusing in the UI

Tools you wish existed that aren’t there yet

I’m still treating this as a long‑term side project, so honest feedback from other devs is way more useful than me guessing in a vacuum.

Thanks for reading—and if Tool Vault quietly saves you 30 seconds some night while you’re debugging something annoying, that’s pretty much the whole point.

DEV Community: Tyler Heinrichs

I Got Tired Of Crappy Tool Sites, So I Built My Own (120+ Free Dev Tools)