DEV Community

lianglili
lianglili

Posted on

I Built Fastools: 70+ Free Browser Tools for Images, Video, PDF, and Everyday Dev Work

#buildinpublic #productivity #showdev #tools

I Built Fastools: 70+ Free Browser Tools for Images, Video, PDF, and Everyday Dev Work

I got tired of opening five different “free tool” sites every week—one for image compression, one for QR codes, one for Base64, another for a quick mortgage or tax estimate—and half of them buried the useful button under ads.

So I built Fastools: a single hub of 70+ free online tools, with each tool living on its own subdomain (for example, image tools, video tools, JSON helpers), and a bilingual index so English and Chinese users can find what they need quickly.

What Fastools is

Fastools is a Toolhub: click a card → open a focused tool → do the job → leave.

Categories include:

  • Image — compress, watermark, merge, cutout / background remove, ID photo, EXIF, favicon, SVG helpers, and more
  • Video & audio — trim, compress, reverse, merge, extract audio, size checks
  • Documents — PDF / Office-related converters (Word ↔ PDF, Markdown → PDF, CSV ↔ Excel, etc.)
  • Dev / text — JSON, Base64, URL encode, encrypt/decrypt, timestamps, QR, password generator, OCR
  • Finance & life — mortgage, compound interest, tax, BMI, lunar calendar, retirement helpers, and similar calculators

Start here:

Design choices that mattered

1. One job per site

Each tool is a small product, not a mega-dashboard. That keeps pages fast and SEO-friendly: people searching for “compress image online” land on a page that only does that.

2. Prefer browser-side processing when possible

For many image/video/text tasks, work happens in the browser (Web APIs / WASM where needed). That usually means:

  • fewer uploads to a random server
  • better privacy for everyday files
  • lower hosting cost as traffic grows

(Some flows still need a backend; the goal is “local first,” not “never any server.”)

3. Bilingual from day one

Chinese and English routes / sites sit side by side. If you ship tools globally, i18n is product work, not a later rewrite.

4. A registry-driven multi-site setup

New tools follow a repeatable pattern: add an app, register metadata, wire the subdomain. That sounds boring—and that’s the point. Consistency is how you ship the 20th tool without chaos.

Who it’s for

  • Developers who need a quick encode/decode, JSON tidy, QR, or password
  • Designers / marketers compressing or watermarking images
  • Anyone who wants a calculator without installing an app
  • People who prefer no signup for small one-off tasks

What I’m optimizing for next

  • Better discovery (search + related tools)
  • Clearer English copy on every tool page
  • Performance and accessibility polish
  • More “task-shaped” guides (how-to pages that match real search queries)

Try it

If you have 30 seconds, pick one task you do often—compress an image, generate a QR code, Base64 something, or check a video file—and try it on Fastools:

https://www.fastools.cc/en

Feedback is welcome: which tool do you open weekly that still feels annoying on the open web? That’s the backlog that matters.

Top comments (0)