I Built 135 Free Browser Tools — No Ads, No Sign-Up, No Tracking

#productivity #showdev #sideprojects #tooling

I'm not a startup. I don't have a team. I'm just a developer who got tired of landing on tool websites that shove ads in your face, demand an account before you can do anything, or worse — quietly harvest your data in the background.

So I built my own: Jorres Apps — a growing collection of 135 free browser-based tools and mini-games. Open one, use it, close it. That's it.

What's inside

The tools span 10 categories:

Developer tools
JSON formatter, Regex tester, JWT generator, Diff checker, CIDR calculator, SQL formatter, CSS formatter, Base64 tool, UUID generator, Cron builder, HTML previewer, Code beautifier, Chmod calculator, and more.

PDF & image tools
PDF merger, PDF splitter, PDF compressor, PDF to image, PDF to Word, Image cropper, Image filters, Watermark tool, EXIF viewer, SVG to PNG, Favicon generator, Meme generator.

Finance & calculators
Loan calculator, Compound interest, ROI calculator, Break-even calculator, VAT calculator, Salary calculator, Inflation calculator, Expense splitter, Depreciation calculator, Tip calculator.

Productivity
Kanban board, Pomodoro timer, Habit tracker, Todo list, Journal, Sticky notes, Mind map, OKR tracker, Gantt chart, Meeting timer, Budget tracker.

Games
2048, Tetris, Snake, Minesweeper, Sudoku, Chess, Battleship, Flappy Bird, Wordle, Hangman, Connect Four, Simon Says, Memory card game, Tic-tac-toe, and more.

And more: Color tools, Text utilities, Health calculators, Network tools, Data visualizers, Business templates...

The rules I set for myself

When I started building this, I made three non-negotiable rules:

1. No ads — ever.
I'd rather accept donations via QR code than clutter the UI with banners. Tools should feel clean.

2. No accounts required.
You shouldn't need to sign up to convert a PDF or generate a UUID. That's friction nobody asked for.

3. No tracking.
Apps that save state (Notepad, Kanban, Journal) use localStorage only. Your data never leaves your browser. No cookies, no analytics, no server-side storage.

How it's built

The stack is intentionally simple:

Backend: Python + Flask, hosted on Render
Frontend: Vanilla JS + a bit of React where complexity demands it
Storage: localStorage only — zero database for user data
Deployment: Render free tier (yes, with the cold start problem — I'm solving that separately) One of the interesting challenges was building 135 tools without them feeling like 135 disconnected pages. Everything lives under one roof with a unified search (Ctrl+K), category navigation, and a favorites system so you can pin the tools you actually reach for daily.

The cold start problem

Render's free tier spins down after 15 minutes of inactivity. So I used Uptimerobot that pings my sitemap URLs on a loop every 10 minutes to keep the server warm. Unglamorous, but it works.

Why I'm sharing this

A few reasons:

I genuinely use these tools myself every week.
I want feedback — what's broken, what's missing, what could be better
If even one of these tools saves you 5 minutes of Googling, it's worth it.

The project is live at jorresapps.onrender.com. No install, no account, just open and use.

If it's useful to you, there's a donation QR code on the homepage. Every contribution keeps the project running and motivates me to keep adding tools.

What's next

Custom domain (getting off .onrender.com)
Dark mode refinements
More developer tools (HTTP client improvements, YAML editor, more converters)
PWA support so tools work offline Drop a comment if there's a tool you wish existed — I'm actively adding new ones.

Built by one developer, for developers (and everyone else). Free forever.

Tags: #webdev #javascript #python #tools #opensource