Last week I challenged myself: build and ship one useful developer tool every day for a week. No signup walls, no freemium tricks -- just genuinely useful tools that solve real problems.
Here's what came out of it.
The Tools
1. OG Tag Checker (ogchecker.grabshot.dev)
Paste a URL, instantly see how it looks when shared on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Slack. Shows all Open Graph and Twitter Card meta tags with warnings for missing or malformed ones.
Why I built it: I was debugging why my blog posts looked broken on Twitter. Existing OG checkers were either slow, required login, or showed ads everywhere.
2. Website Grader (webgrader.grabshot.dev)
Scores your website on performance, SEO, security, and accessibility. Uses Lighthouse under the hood but presents results in a way that's actually actionable.
3. Meta Tag Generator (metatag.grabshot.dev)
Fill in a form, get copy-pasteable <meta> tags for SEO, Open Graph, and Twitter Cards. Includes a live preview of how your page will look when shared.
4. PDF API (pdf.grabshot.dev)
Convert any HTML to a pixel-perfect PDF via API. Supports custom headers/footers, page sizes, margins, and CSS print media. 25 free conversions/month.
5. MetaPeek (metapeek.grabshot.dev)
Extract all metadata from any URL as structured JSON. Title, description, OG tags, favicons, tech stack detection, and more. Great for building link previews.
6. Screenshot API (grabshot.dev)
Full-page website screenshots via API. Custom viewports, retina, dark mode, element selectors, PDF output. The backbone that powers several of the other tools.
7. Page Audit (pageaudit.grabshot.dev)
Deep-dive technical audit of any webpage: broken links, missing alt text, heading hierarchy, and 50+ other checks.
What I Learned
Ship ugly, fix later
Day 1 I spent 4 hours on the landing page before writing any API code. Day 2 I shipped with a landing page that took 20 minutes. Day 2's tool got more usage.
Free tools are the best marketing
Every tool links back to the core Screenshot API. Users discover GrabShot not through ads but through genuinely useful free tools. The OG Checker alone drives more traffic than any blog post.
One codebase pattern, seven apps
I used the same stack for all seven: Express + vanilla HTML/CSS/JS + SQLite for usage tracking. No React, no build step. Each app is ~500 lines of server code. Deploys in under a minute via PM2.
Subdomains > subdirectories for tools
Each tool gets its own subdomain (ogchecker.grabshot.dev). This means each tool can rank independently on Google, has its own identity, and can be shared without looking like a sub-page of something else.
The hardest part is distribution
Building 7 tools took 7 days. Getting people to find them? That's the real challenge. Submitting to directories, writing about them, and waiting for Google to index a new domain is a patience game.
The Stack
- Server: Node.js + Express
- Frontend: Vanilla HTML/CSS/JS (no framework)
- Screenshots: Puppeteer (headless Chrome)
-
PDF: Puppeteer's
page.pdf() - Database: SQLite (simple, no setup)
- Reverse proxy: Caddy (auto HTTPS)
- Process manager: PM2
-
Hosting: Single VPS with wildcard DNS (
*.grabshot.dev)
Total hosting cost: ~$10/month for the VPS. That's it.
Try Them Out
All tools are free to use, no signup required:
If you're building developer tools, I'd love to hear what you'd add to this list. What small utilities do you wish existed?
Top comments (0)