About ToyTools

ToyTools is the internet's little toolbox: small, fast utilities on one shared browser-side platform. No accounts, no uploads, no servers.

What it is

A toolbox is the right picture, and it sets the bar. You open a drawer, take out the one thing that does the job, and put it back. Nothing in a toolbox asks who you are, keeps a record of what you built, or wants half an hour of setup before it turns.

166 utilities across 15 categories: counting and cleaning text, converting and encoding data, working out money and dates, and a set of interactive physics and maths playgrounds. Each one does a single job, opens instantly, and needs nothing from you before it works. 166 of them come with a written guide for the times the tool alone is not the whole answer.

It is a platform, not a folder

The tools are the part you see. Underneath them is one system, and that is the actual thing being built here. The computation lives in 24 shared engines that are tested on their own, away from any page. The interface, the keyboard behaviour, the saved state, the offline support and the privacy contract belong to the platform. What a tool contributes is mostly a declaration of which engine it runs on.

That is why a correctness fix lands for every tool on an engine at once instead of in one of them, why the hundredth tool is no slower or stranger than the tenth, and why every tool page is signed Powered by ToyTools rather than standing on its own.

How it works

Every engine runs in your browser. There is no application server, no database and no account system, which is not a limitation being worked around but the design: a utility that computes a word count or a loan schedule has no business uploading your text or your salary to anyone. It also means the tools stay fast, keep working offline, and can be installed to a phone's home screen as their own app.

The site is generated ahead of time and served as static files, so what reaches your browser is a page and a small amount of code, not a framework. Pages have a byte budget that the build enforces; if a change makes a page heavier than its budget, the build fails rather than quietly spending your bandwidth. What that costs and what it buys is in the privacy page, the platform page and the architecture map.

How tools get chosen

Not by guessing. New tools are picked from evidence about what people are actually trying to do and where the existing options are weak, and anything better served by a conversation with an AI than by an exact algorithm is deliberately left alone. ToyTools is for the things with a right answer: conversions, counts, calculations, simulations.

The most useful thing you can send is a problem rather than a feature request. If you keep doing something by hand, that is worth knowing about. Tell us what you were trying to do.

Elsewhere on the site

  • Platform — the engines, the runtime and the guarantees every tool inherits.
  • Architecture — an interactive map of how the site is put together, generated from the catalog itself.
  • Changelog — what has changed, release by release.
  • Privacy — what is stored, what is sent, and what never leaves your device.
  • Settings — export, import or delete everything the site has saved for you.