I built 50+ developer tools that run entirely in your browser — here's why privacy matters and how I did it
Every week I open a new browser tab and search for something like "json formatter online" or "jwt decoder" or "regex tester". And every week I land on a site that: Shows me three ad banners before I can see the tool Requires me to create an account to "save" my work Is quietly uploading my payload to their server That last one bothers me most. Developers paste real things into these tools — JWT tokens with live user data, passwords they're about to deploy, private keys, internal API responses. Most people assume these tools are "just a webpage" and nothing is being sent anywhere. Often that's not true. So I built SnapTxt — a collection of 50+ developer utilities that run 100% client-side. No backend. No account. No tracking. Your data never leaves your browser. What's in it The toolkit covers the things I reach for most often: Data & text JSON formatter, validator, minifier, diff, tree explorer SQL formatter XML formatter YAML → JSON, CSV → JSON converters Base64 encode/decode, URL encoder, hash generator Auth & security JWT decoder & generator RSA key generator bcrypt generator x.509 certificate decoder Password generator Images Image compressor Image format converter Image to text (OCR via Tesseract.js) SVG to PNG, favicon generator, code-to-image Frontend / CSS Regex tester CSS gradient generator, box shadow generator Color converter Mermaid live editor HTML live editor, HTML to Markdown, HTML to JSX Cron expression builder And more — word counter, text diff, unix timestamp, lorem ipsum, QR code generator, markdown to PDF, and a collection of Australian and NZ business number validators. How it's built It's a Next.js app deployed as a fully static export to Firebase Hosting. There is no server. Every tool runs in the browser using: CodeMirror 6 for editor-style inputs Tesseract.js for OCR (runs a WASM binary in a web worker) Chrome's built-in Prompt API (Gemini Nano) for the AI explain features in JSON, SQL, and JWT tools — meaning even the AI inference is on-dev