I built a free, no-signup AI text toolkit - here's the stack and why

I kept hitting the same small friction: I'd want to quickly rewrite an email, clean up some text, or summarize a long thread — and every tool wanted me to sign up, pick a plan, or watch an ad first. For a ten-second task, that's absurd. So I built the thing I wanted: a set of free, no-signup AI text tools , each doing one job well. This is a quick write-up of the stack and the decisions behind it. 👉 Live: https://www.texttoolsai.app The core idea: one tool, one job, zero friction Instead of a single mega-app, it's a collection of single-purpose tools — rewrite, tone change, summarize, prompt generation — each on its own page. You land, paste, get output. No account, no modal, no paywall. The "no signup" rule forced good constraints: everything has to work instantly and statelessly, which kept the whole thing simple. The stack Next.js (App Router) — server components for the content/SEO pages, client components only where the tool actually needs interactivity. Vercel for hosting — the deploy story is boringly good, which is what you want. An LLM API on the backend — the browser never sees a key; requests go through a Next.js route handler that owns the prompt and the provider call. Tailwind for styling — fast to iterate, easy to keep consistent across dozens of tool pages. One decision that paid off: data-driven pages Every tool is defined as a config object (label, placeholder, system prompt, endpoint) rather than a hand-built page. Adding a new tool is mostly adding data, not wiring up new routing. That's what made it realistic to ship a lot of tools without the codebase turning into spaghetti. // simplified shape { slug: 'rewrite', label: 'Paste your text', endpoint: '/api/tools/rewriter', systemPrompt: '...' } The route handler resolves the endpoint key against a map of system prompts, so the API surface stays tiny even as the tool count grows. What I'd tell anyone building something similar Keep the API key server-side. Obvious, but easy to leak through a miscon