I built 500+ free tools in 10 days — here's what actually happened

It started with a JSON formatter. I was sitting at my desk at 11 PM, pasting some messy API response into one of those "free online JSON tools" — and the page had 14 ads, two newsletter popups, and a cookie banner bigger than the actual text area. The JSON formatted fine. But I felt gross using it. So I closed the tab, opened VS Code, and started writing a JSON formatter. No plan. No Notion doc. Just annoyance and caffeine. How 1 tool became 500 I finished the formatter in maybe 2 hours. And then I thought — okay, I already have this FastAPI route and this Jinja2 template... what if I just add a JSON validator too? Same skeleton, different logic. That's how it starts. You build one thing and suddenly you're going "well I need a YAML converter anyway for work" and "Base64 encoder would take like 20 minutes" and before you know it you've got 50 of these things. I hit 100 and genuinely lost count for a few days. The setup is dead simple. Python route, Jinja2 template, vanilla JS doing the