Why I keep a folder of free tool sites
Most free tool sites die within a year. The domain lapses, the maintainer moves on, and your bookmark returns a 404. So when a small site survives a full year, keeps its tools fast and free with no signup wall, I think it earns a mention. This post is a short tour of five tool sites I have bookmarked through 2026. Each one does one job well.
1. Decimal Time Calculator (decimaltime.xyz)
If you have ever filled in a timesheet that asks for hours in decimal, this site saves you from doing math at 6pm on a Friday. Type 7 hours 45 minutes, get 7.75. The payroll trick it handles: many systems (QuickBooks Time among them) display rounded hours, so 7:45 becomes 7.75 billed hours. There is a full page on the decimal hours calculator that explains where the rounding traps are, plus a guide for timesheet workflows covering lawyer-style 0.1h increments and EU working time records.
2. Color Dice (colordice.xyz)
Designers and tabletop gamers both roll for color. The online color dice gives you a random hex per roll, and the random color generator page explains the difference between uniform RGB sampling (16,777,216 possible values) and perceptually even palettes like HSL-based generation. I use it to break out of the same five Tailwind defaults.
3. Resize in KB (resizekb.xyz)
Upload portals are the worst: government forms that cap uploads at 240KB, job boards that silently reject 5MB photos. ResizeKB compresses to a target file size, not a target quality, which is the part most tools get wrong. The reduce image size guide walks through real caps (DS-160 at 240KB, several Indian exam portals at 20-50KB) and why stripping EXIF data alone saves 10-30KB.
4. Robot Voice (robotvoice.top)
Type text, get audio that sounds like a 1963 Dalek or a 1940s SIGSALY scrambler. Good for podcast intros, game prototypes, and videos that need an obviously synthetic narrator. The voice effects page has the history: ring modulation is what made the original Dalek voices, and it is still the cheapest way to sound inhuman.
5. AVIF to JPG (aviftojpg.top)
AVIF saves 30% bandwidth versus JPEG, but half the software you meet still cannot open it. Instagram started converting incoming AVIF in 2023; WordPress only gained native support in 6.5. When a client sends a .avif and your editor refuses it, the AVIF to JPG converter handles it in the browser, no upload queue. There is also a page on opening AVIF files when the file resists identification.
What these sites have in common
No accounts. No watermarks. No 5-tool-per-day limits. Each one solves a single boring problem in the browser. That is also why they load fast: a tool that weighs 3MB of JavaScript to convert 60KB of image has lost the plot.
If you maintain a small tool site, the lesson from these five is the same: one job, fast page, honest page copy. The rest is patience while search engines decide whether to trust a young domain.
*Tags: tools, web utilities, bookmarks*