This week another headline dropped: a threat actor is reportedly selling around 3.6 million employee records lifted from Microsoft Azure environments across multiple Fortune 500 companies. It's not an isolated story — breach-tracking groups are on pace to blow past last year's record for reported data compromises, and a big chunk of that volume is coming from third-party exposure: not the company you trust, but some tool or vendor sitting quietly in the middle of your workflow.
That third-party category is worth sitting with if you're a developer, because it includes a tool most of us use constantly and think about the least: the random online JSON formatter, regex tester, or Base64 decoder we paste real data into to debug something at 11pm.
Think about what actually goes through those tools. API keys. Auth tokens. Chunks of production payloads. Customer data you're trying to reformat for a bug report. Most of us don't stop to check whether the site we just pasted that into is logging it, storing it, or shipping it to a third-party server for "analytics." It's just a formatter. It feels disposable. It isn't.
That's the exact problem I built FormatStack to not have.
No server round-trip for your data, full stop. The JSON formatter, regex tester, UUID generator, Base64 encoder/decoder, and cron parser all run entirely in your browser — plain JS, no framework, no backend call carrying your pasted content anywhere. What you paste never leaves your machine. Not "we don't log it" (a policy, which you have to trust) — it architecturally can't leave, because there's no endpoint for it to go to.
Given how much this year's breach numbers are increasingly driven by data sitting somewhere it didn't need to, "the data just never leaves your browser" isn't a nice-to-have. For a debugging tool, it's the only architecture that actually makes sense.
If you want to see it or check the claim yourself: formatstack.tech
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