Small tools that do one job, run on your own machine, and do not ask for anything.
Most online tools work by taking your file, sending it to a server, doing the work there and sending something back. That is the easy way to build one, and it has two consequences the visitor pays for: your file has been on someone else’s computer, and the site has to charge for the capacity — hence the file-size caps, the queues, the daily limits and the watermarks.
Browsers can do this work themselves now. Canvas, WebAudio, WebCodecs and WebAssembly are enough to compress an image, cut audio, re-encode a video or read a PDF without anything leaving the machine. Building it that way removes the file-size cap and the queue at the same time as removing the privacy question, because there is no server to be slow or to keep anything.
Nothing is uploaded, so there is no limit on how large a file can be beyond what your own machine can hold. There is no account, so there is nothing to sign up for and nothing to cancel. There is no queue, because the work happens on your processor rather than a shared one. And the tools keep working offline once the page has loaded — install the site to your home screen and it works on a plane.
The trade is honest to state: heavy work runs at the speed of your device rather than a data centre’s, and a few things genuinely need a modern browser. Where a tool depends on a browser feature that is not everywhere, it says so on its own page rather than failing silently.
ToolMole is a small independent project, not a company with a sales team. It is built and maintained by one developer, and the mole is not a mascot committee decision.
Running costs are low precisely because the tools do not use a server for the work — there is hosting for the pages and nothing else. The plan is to cover that with advertising rather than by charging, keeping the tools free and unlimited. If ads appear, they will be clearly separated from the tools and will never be placed where they could be mistaken for a button you meant to press.
A tool that gets something wrong, a language that reads badly, or something that should exist and does not — all of it is welcome at [email protected]. Bug reports that say which browser and which file are the ones that get fixed fastest.