I Built 53 Free Browser Tools. Here's What I Learned About What Developers Actually Use

Last year I started building small browser-based utilities: a JSON formatter, a regex tester, a color palette generator, an image compressor. No backend, no signup, just a page that does one thing well. Eight months later there are 59 tools at tooly.work — 53 of them completely free, plus a few premium apps (invoice generator, PDF-to-CSV, domain search) for the jobs that need more power.

Here are the five things that surprised me:

1. Downloadable results beat copy-paste results.

Tools that produce a file (CSV export, PDF merge, ZIP) get 3–5× more return visits than tools that produce text you copy. People bookmark them as "the thing I use every month." Build for the repeat visit, not the one-off.

2. "No signup" is the feature people mention first.