About Toolpile
A small pile of tools that do one thing each, without asking you for anything first.
The problem this site is trying to solve
Search for something as simple as "compress an image" and you land on a page that wants an email address, uploads your file to a server in a country you did not choose, caps you at three files a day, stamps a watermark on the result, and then offers to remove the watermark for $9 a month. The task itself takes about 40 milliseconds of computation.
Toolpile is the other version of that. Open a tool, use it, close the tab. There is no account because there is nothing to store. There is no upload because your browser can already do the work.
How the tools actually work
Every file tool here runs on your device, using capabilities browsers have had for years — the canvas API for images, the Web Crypto API for random values. Your files are never transmitted anywhere, which is not a privacy promise so much as a description of the architecture: there is no server to send them to.
You do not have to take that on faith. Open your browser's developer tools, switch to the Network tab, and use any tool on the site. You will not see an upload. Then try it again with your internet disconnected — once a page has loaded, the tools keep working.
What the guides are for
The free alternatives section covers the same territory from the other direction: instead of building a tool, pointing at software that already exists and is free.
These guides follow one rule — say where the free option falls short, clearly and early. Most "best free alternatives" articles are lists of names with the drawbacks carefully omitted, which is how you end up three hours into installing something that was never going to do the one thing you needed. If GIMP is going to frustrate you, that belongs in the first paragraph, not in a comment thread.
The extensions
Some problems are not a page you visit — they are a thing your browser should just be doing. Those became two Chrome extensions: one that keeps a second time zone in your toolbar so you stop doing the arithmetic, and one that applies your playback preferences to every YouTube video instead of making you set them again each time.
They follow the same rules as everything here. Free, no account, no analytics, and the narrowest set of permissions each one can function with.
How this is funded
Toolpile carries advertising. That is the entire business model: no paid tier, no upsell, no "pro" version with the useful features behind it, and nothing about you sold to anyone.
Ads are placed between content blocks, never inside a tool's interface, and never in a position designed to be clicked by accident. If an ad ever makes a tool harder to use, that is a bug — tell me about it.
The privacy policy explains what advertising means for cookies in practice, including how to turn personalised ads off.
What's coming
The pile grows as tools get built. The bar for adding one is that it should work without an account, without an upload, and without a catch. Requests are welcome and genuinely read — if you keep hitting a signup wall for something small and stupid, that is exactly the kind of thing worth building.
Last updated September 19, 2026