5 Python tools I built to solve my own problems — no signup, no watermark, no BS

#python #webdev #programming #productivity

I built 5 free image tools because I was tired of "free" tools asking for my email

Every few weeks I hit the same wall: I need to remove a background, upscale a photo, compress a PNG, or convert a file. I open Google, click the first result, and get hit with the same pattern:

"Enter your email to download"
A watermark that wasn't there in the preview
A 3-per-day limit that magically unlocks with a $9/month subscription
A privacy policy that says they keep my uploads

I got tired of it. So over the last few weeks I built my own.

Today I'm launching DailyProTasks — 5 free image/file tools with a set of rules I set for myself:

No signup — it works on first visit
No watermark — ever
No file storage — processed in memory, discarded immediately
No daily limits — free forever

https://dailyprotasks.com

What's in it

Tool	What it does
✂️ Background Remover	AI cutouts in ~3s, single + bulk (20 files), ZIP download
🔍 Image Upscaler	2× or 4× enlargement using Real-ESRGAN
📦 Image Compressor	Hit a target KB with lossless or lossy modes
🔁 File Converter	15+ formats: JPG, PNG, WebP, HEIC, GIF, TIFF, BMP, PDF, JSON, CSV, XLSX, XML, YAML
📄 PDF Generator	Combine images into one PDF, A4/Letter/original

The stack

Backend: FastAPI + Python 3.12
ML: U²-Net (background removal), Real-ESRGAN (upscaling)
Image: Pillow + OpenCV
Proxy: nginx (reverse proxy + static file serving)
Hosting: AWS EC2 t3.micro on Windows Server 2025
SSL: Let's Encrypt via win-acme
Services: NSSM (runs uvicorn + nginx as Windows services)
Frontend: Vanilla HTML/CSS/JS with a service worker for PWA support

3 hard lessons I learned

1. Windows Server 2025 on EC2 will fight you

Every tutorial on the internet assumes Linux. I picked Windows Server because I know Windows better. Big mistake for a first deploy — but I learned a lot.

Two days lost to:

RDP locking me out whenever my home IP changed (fixed by switching to Session Manager)
Windows Firewall rules not persisting after reboots
pdftoppm not existing on Windows (fixed by switching to pypdfium2)

Lesson: If you're deploying a Python web app in 2026 and don't specifically need Windows, use Ubuntu.

2. ML models eat RAM on a $7/month server

The first version loaded rembg's U²-Net model at import time. That pushed uvicorn from 150 MB to 700 MB. On a t3.micro with 1 GB RAM, that's game over — Windows killed the RDP service under memory pressure.

Fix: lazy loading with lru_cache:


python
from functools import lru_cache

@lru_cache(maxsize=1)
def _get_session():
    from rembg import new_session
    return new_session("u2net")

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