From Text Cleaner to Full Toolkit: Building 30+ Free Browser Tools

Here's the revised article:

From Text Cleaner to Full Toolkit: Building 30+ Free Browser Tools
A few months ago, I needed to clean up some messy text from a PDF. The online tools I found were either drowning in ads, required sign-ups, or wanted to send my data to their servers.
So I built my own. Then I kept building.
What started as a simple text cleaner has grown into CleanUpTxt: a suite of 30+ free browser tools covering text processing, image OCR, code conversion, and creative generators. Everything runs client-side. No data leaves your browser.
Here's how it happened and what I learned along the way.
The Stack
I kept it simple:

React + TypeScript
Tailwind CSS
Tesseract.js for OCR (fully client-side)
Hosted on Vercel

The priority was speed. Most tools load instantly and work offline once cached. No backend means no data privacy concerns – your text and images never touch a server.
What's in the Toolkit
Text Cleaning
The originals. Remove line breaks, duplicates, empty lines, HTML tags, commas. Trim whitespace. The boring stuff that saves you 10 minutes of manual work.
Text Formatting
Case converter, find & replace, sort lines, add prefix/suffix, slugify text, make text CSV-safe. Plus a Bionic Reading converter for those who want to speed up their reading.
Conversion Tools
Markdown editor with live preview, HTML escape/unescape, Base64 encode/decode, URL encode/decode, JSON to TOON formatter, and a Lorem Ipsum generator.
Analysis
Word counter, character counter, readability checker, text diff comparison, and an email/data extractor for pulling structured info from messy text.
Image to Text (OCR)
This one runs entirely in your browser using Tesseract.js. Upload a screenshot or photo, get editable text back. No upload to any server.
Creative Generators
Fancy text generator, Discord fonts, cursive text, glitch text, Zalgo text, invisible characters. These let you create ˢᵗʸˡⁱˢʰ ᵗᵉˣᵗ for social bios, usernames, and messages.
What Actually Gets Traffic
Not what I expected.
The Fancy Text Generator and Discord Fonts dominate. People want 𝓯𝓪𝓷𝓬𝔂 𝓽𝓮𝔁𝓽 for Instagram bios, Discord usernames, and Twitter profiles. It's not glamorous, but it's what people search for.
OCR surprised me too. Students use it constantly to extract text from lecture slides and screenshots.
The developer tools (Base64, JSON, Markdown) get steady traffic but nothing explosive. Turns out there's more competition in that space – and fewer people searching.
Lesson learned: Build for problems people are actively Googling, not just what seems technically impressive.
The Boring Middle
Nobody talks about this part of side projects.
Week one is exciting. You ship fast, everything is new, dopamine is flowing. Then comes the grind: SEO tweaks, edge case fixes, mobile responsiveness, writing meta descriptions for 30+ pages.
I've started treating side projects like a two-project rotation. When one gets boring, I switch to the other. It keeps me moving forward without burning out on the repetitive stuff.
The projects that win are the ones you don't abandon.
Privacy as a Feature
Every tool processes data client-side. Your text, your images – none of it hits a server.
This wasn't just an ethical choice. It's simpler to build, cheaper to run, and turns out people actually care. "No sign-up, no data collection" resonates more than I expected.
What's Next

More generators (ASCII art, more Unicode styles)
Better mobile experience
Possibly an API for developers who want to integrate these tools

Try It
Everything is free at CleanUpTxt.com. No sign-up, no limits.
If there's a tool you wish existed, let me know in the comments. Always looking for what to build next.