A small drawer of useful web tools.

Most of the work I do on the web involves the same handful of tiny tasks. Check if this color passes contrast. Convert this headline to Title Case. Generate Schema.org markup for the article I just wrote. Figure out what a thousand GPT-4o calls will actually cost before I ship the feature. None of these are big enough to be their own project, but all of them show up often enough that I can't be bothered to Google for a tool every single time.

WebUtils exists because I got tired of the cycle — searching for a tool, finding one that mostly works, using it once, forgetting about it, then hunting for the same thing again two weeks later. Sometimes the tool I landed on was fine. Often it was buried under ads, gated behind a signup, or crammed with twenty features I didn't need for the one job I was trying to finish. After the tenth repeat, I figured I'd just keep the useful bits in one place, built the way I actually want to use them.

That's the whole origin story. No grand vision. No product roadmap pinned to a wall. Just a personal shortcut that kept growing as new annoyances surfaced.

What's actually in the toolbox

Right now, six tools live here. Each one does a specific job, does it reasonably well, and tries to get out of your way once it's done. There's no plan to turn this into a directory of hundreds of widgets — just a slow, steady accumulation of things I actually use.

The goal isn't to cover every possible niche on the internet. It's to cover the repeated little jobs that show up often enough to be genuinely annoying. The kind of thing you'd solve in five minutes with a snippet if you were fresh, but takes ten minutes of hunting when you're three hours into a deadline.

Why the browser does most of the work

A lot of tools on this site are designed to run locally in your browser wherever that makes sense. In plain terms, that means your text, colors, images and inputs get processed right on your device using JavaScript that's already loaded on the page — rather than being shipped off to a server and back just to produce a result.

There are a few reasons I lean this way. It keeps things fast, because there's no round-trip to wait for. It keeps the tools light, since the browser already has everything they need. And it has a pleasant side effect: for many of the tools, you can save the page and keep a working copy on your own machine. Not every tool works fully offline — some still pull in small external files — but the ones that are self-contained become essentially portable.

Who ends up using it

If you touch websites for a living, you'll probably recognize most of the problems these tools solve. WebUtils is used more like a utility drawer than a product suite — something you reach into for a specific job rather than something you "adopt."

If your actual work sits somewhere between those boxes — which most people's does — that's fine too. The tools don't assume you fit into a single job title. Modern digital work blurs roles constantly, and a utility that helps a designer today might be what a backend developer reaches for tomorrow.

The constraint that keeps things usable

Each tool is meant to do one job clearly. That's a deliberate rule, not just a nice intention. The moment a utility tries to solve every possible variation of a problem, it usually gets harder to use for the common case — which is, by definition, what most people need most of the time.

So the focus stays narrow on purpose. Quick to understand. Quick to run. Easy to copy the result out of. No setup screens unless they're actually doing something. If a tool has options, each one should earn its place — not exist because a settings panel looks more "complete" with it.

Over time, some tools will grow a little as real use cases pile up. That's expected. The aim doesn't change: stay practical, stay readable, and keep the workflow smooth enough that you don't have to think about the tool itself while you're using it.

The best tool is the one you forget is there — you just have the answer you needed and you're already on to the next thing.

What comes next

WebUtils is a small, hand-curated collection. I add tools when I run into a real problem worth solving with a focused, browser-based utility — not because there's a quota to fill. If you find yourself searching for the same tiny helper twice, it might end up here eventually.

In the meantime, everything that's already built is ready to use. No accounts, no paywalls, no tracking pixels. Just open a tool and get on with your work.

Common questions