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Roy Yan
Roy Yan

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I Built 199 Free Developer Tools in One Website — Here's What I Learned

#showdev #nextjs #productivity #webdev

Every developer has a bookmark folder full of random online tools. JSON formatters, base64 encoders, color pickers, regex testers — scattered across dozens of ad-heavy websites that take 5 seconds to load.

I got tired of it. So I built FastDevKit — a single website with 199 free tools across 14 categories, supporting 4 languages, deployed for $0/month.

Here's what I learned along the way.

The Spark

I was working on a side project and needed to quickly decode a JWT token. I opened the first Google result — a wall of ads, a cookie banner, and a loading spinner. For a tool that should be instant.

That moment I thought: what if there was one clean, fast site with every small utility a developer needs? No login, no ads (at least not obnoxious ones), no nonsense.

Two weeks later, FastDevKit had 157 tools. A few weeks after that, 199.

Lesson 1: Next.js 14 Static Export Is Underrated

I chose Next.js with full static export (output: 'export'). No server components, no API routes, no serverless functions. Every page is pre-rendered HTML.

Why? Because developer tools run entirely in the browser. There is nothing to compute on the server.

Static export gave me:

  • Instant page loads — it's just HTML + JS, served from a CDN
  • Zero server cost — Vercel's free tier handles static sites generously
  • Dead-simple deployment — vercel --prod and done
  • Reliability — nothing to crash, no cold starts, no timeouts

If your app doesn't need a server, don't use one.

Lesson 2: 4-Language i18n Without a Framework

FastDevKit supports English, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. I didn't use next-intl or next-i18next. Instead, I went with a simple folder-based approach:

/en/tools/json-formatter
/zh/tools/json-formatter
/ja/tools/json-formatter
/ko/tools/json-formatter
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Each locale has its own JSON translation file. At build time, Next.js generates all 4 versions of every page.

The result: 780+ URLs in the sitemap. Every tool, in every language, gets its own indexable page.

Lesson 3: SEO Is a Numbers Game

With 780+ URLs, I expected Google to index everything quickly. Reality check:

  • Week 1: 6 pages indexed, 24 impressions, 0 clicks
  • Week 2: Slowly crawling more pages, 255 URLs "discovered"
  • Week 3+: Steady growth as Google digested the sitemap

What actually moved the needle:

  • Unique <title> and <meta description> for every tool page
  • Canonical tags pointing to the English version as default
  • Internal linking between related tools
  • Blog content to signal the site isn't just a thin tool wrapper

Lesson 4: Zero-Cost Deployment Is Real

Service Cost Purpose
Vercel (free tier) $0 Hosting + CDN
Cloudflare (free tier) $0 DNS
Google Search Console $0 SEO monitoring

No database. No authentication. No storage. Static site + Vercel free tier.

Lesson 5: Ship Categories, Not Individual Tools

14 categories, 199 tools:

  • Text & String tools
  • JSON/XML/YAML tools
  • CSS & Color tools
  • Crypto & Hash tools
  • Date & Time tools
  • Math & Number tools
  • Code tools (regex, diff, minifiers)
  • SEO tools
  • Unit converters
  • Random generators
  • Encoding tools (Base64, URL, HTML)
  • Developer utilities (UUID, Lorem Ipsum, etc.)

Shipping by category meant each launch felt meaningful. "10 new CSS tools" is more interesting than "I added a hex-to-rgb converter."

Try It Out

If you're a developer who uses online tools daily, give FastDevKit.com a try. It's free, fast, and doesn't ask you to sign up for anything.

What tools are missing? What categories would you want? Drop a comment below.

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