Support the Infrastructure Behind Online Dev Tools

Why this platform exists

Online Dev Tools was built to solve a specific problem: engineers need quick, reliable utilities during active work, but most online tools require accounts, send data to remote servers, or load slowly under heavy JavaScript. Every tool on this platform runs in the browser using client-side JavaScript. No data leaves your machine. No account is required. No processing happens on a backend server.

That constraint is intentional. When you paste a JWT, a JSON payload, a Content Security Policy header, or a hash input into one of these tools, it stays in your browser tab. That matters for engineers working with production credentials, internal API responses, or sensitive infrastructure data where sending it to an unknown third-party server is not an option.

The platform covers JSON formatting, JWT decoding, CSP analysis, cryptographic hashing, log exploration, network utilities, text tools, and more. The full list is on the All Tools page.

What the infrastructure actually costs

Because tools run client-side, the backend is intentionally minimal. The site is hosted on Cloudflare Pages. There are no application servers, no databases, and no managed compute to pay for. The cost base is primarily bandwidth, Cloudflare Workers for any server-side routing, domain registration and renewal, and the time spent building and maintaining tools.

Time is the largest cost. Each tool takes meaningful engineering time to build correctly, test across browsers, handle edge cases, and keep updated as web APIs evolve. Writing documentation, publishing technical guides on the blog, and creating content for the Learn hub is additional work that runs in parallel with tool development.

Advertising offsets some of this. The site runs Google AdSense. Ads are displayed but they do not gate access to any tool, and they do not alter the data processing model — tools still run locally regardless. If ads are acceptable to you, running the site without an adblocker is the zero-friction way to contribute.

Philosophy: privacy-first, local-first tools

The design philosophy here is that developer tools should be trustworthy by default. That means you should not have to wonder whether your JWT is being logged, whether your JSON payload is stored, or whether your IP lookup is being tied to a profile. The answer to all of those questions on this site is no — because the architecture makes it structurally impossible, not just a policy claim.

Local-first also means no accounts. There is nothing to sign up for, no email to confirm, no session to expire. Open a tool, use it, close it. That is the intended workflow. If you are in the middle of an incident, debugging an API issue at 2am, or reviewing a colleague's JWT before a deployment, you do not want friction. You want the output.

This philosophy extends to the blog and learn content. Guides are written for engineers who already know their domain and need specific, practical information — not padded tutorials or keyword-optimized fluff. The blog covers real workflows: log triage during incident response, CSP hardening from report-only to enforcement, choosing between hashing and HMAC, and using WHOIS for domain intelligence.

Why your support matters

This is an independent project with no VC funding, no SaaS pricing, no premium tier, and no paywall. Tools are free and that is not changing. But free tools still have real costs — in time, in hosting, and in the ongoing work of keeping things running and improving. If a tool has saved you time during a debug session, helped you catch a CSP misconfiguration before it hit production, or let you inspect a JWT without sending it to a third-party service, that is the outcome this platform is built for.

Support through the links below goes directly toward keeping the infrastructure paid for and making time available to add new tools, write new guides, and fix reported bugs. No processing fees are taken on cryptocurrency contributions. Cash App transfers go directly without intermediary cuts. These options exist because they are the lowest-friction ways to send value directly to the person building and maintaining the tools.

If direct financial support is not something you want to do, sharing a specific tool with a colleague, linking to a guide that helped you, or just using the site without an adblocker all contribute in a meaningful way. The goal is for this to keep existing as a reliable resource, and anything that helps with that is appreciated.

What gets built with support

Tool development on this platform follows actual usage and actual requests, not a content strategy. When engineers report that the Log Explorer should handle a specific log format better, or the CSP Analyzer should flag a particular edge case, those are the things that get addressed. When support comes in, the priority shifts toward active development time rather than just maintenance.

Current and near-term work includes a DNS lookup suite, an HTTP header inspector, improvements to the JSON Editor for large documents, and additional hashing algorithm coverage in the Hash Generator. Blog guides and Learn hub content are maintained regularly — the technical writing takes real time to do correctly, and it runs alongside tool development rather than replacing it.

Everything built on this platform is free to use. There is no premium tier and no plan to add one. The tools that exist today will not be gated behind a subscription. The purpose of the support model is to make it possible to keep building more of the same: useful, private, fast, browser-based developer tools that work without asking anything from you first.

The current tool set

JSON tools include the JSON Formatter, JSON Editor, JSON to TypeScript converter, and JWT Decoder. Network tools cover CIDR/IP conversion, WHOIS Lookup, IP Lookup, and a full suite of IP format converters between binary, decimal, and hex. Security tools include the CSP Analyzer and Secure Paste, a client-side encrypted snippet tool for one-time sensitive data sharing. Utility tools cover cryptographic hashing across multiple algorithms, UUID generation, Base64 encoding and decoding, regex testing, diff checking, YAML validation, UNIX timestamp conversion, and text utilities including case conversion, line sorting, and word counting. The complete list with descriptions is on the All Tools page.