Charles
Brands & sites

cool-toolbox

Twenty-eight free web tools that run entirely in the browser. No ads, no accounts, no uploads. The hub background is a working coin machine.

Status
Live
When
Aug 2026
Category
Brands & sites
Links

Search "convert HEIC" and you get ad-choked pages that upload your files somewhere. cool-toolbox is the alternative: image resize and convert, PDF merge, QR codes, and role shelves for teachers and nurses, all computed in your own tab. Every page has a check-for-yourself section that shows how to confirm nothing leaves the browser.

The hub's background is THE FUNDING MACHINE, a self-running coin maze that mints, diverts, queues, and spends on a twelve-second beat.

Screenshot coming
The hub with THE FUNDING MACHINE mid-cycle.
Screenshot coming
The image resizer with a file loaded.
Screenshot coming
The nurse shelf.

Stack

  • Zero-framework static HTML, CSS, and ES modules, no build step
  • Pinned, self-hosted vendor libraries loaded on first use, PDF, HEIC, EXIF, zip, QR, diff
  • Space Grotesk
  • An SVG maze engine on a single animation frame
  • Warpyard, push-to-deploy

Decisions

  1. Zero dependencies and zero backend are the product, not a constraint. The claim can be checked in DevTools, so the claim is on every page.
  2. The second direction replaced the first whole. A near-black v1 was swapped for an electric-blue showfloor after the craft bar changed, per the rule that a pivot retires the old style doc entirely.
  3. Clinical pages ship no dose calculator and cite fetched, named, openly licensed sources with retrieval dates.

Lesson

  1. Reviewers are never builders, and cameras lie. Three permanent verification instruments exist because a review or a screenshot was proven wrong; one headless capture artifact faked a ship-blocking bug.