About Tools In Pocket

Why we built this

Search for something as ordinary as a word counter and you will land on a page covered in ads, asked to create an account, or told your free quota has run out. Worse, many of these sites quietly send whatever you paste to their own servers. For a shopping list that hardly matters. For an unpublished article, a client contract, or an API response full of customer records, it matters a great deal.

We thought the whole category could be simpler. Modern browsers are genuinely powerful. Counting words, hashing a random password, encoding text, parsing JSON and doing calendar arithmetic are all things your own device can handle instantly, with no server involved at all. So that is how every tool here is built.

How our tools actually work

Every tool on Tools In Pocket runs entirely inside your browser using JavaScript. When you paste text into the word counter, the counting happens on your device. When you create a password with the password generator, it is produced by your browser's own cryptographic random number generator and it exists nowhere else, not even in a log file. When you build a code with the QR code generator, the link is encoded directly into the image on your machine.

This is not a marketing claim we are asking you to take on trust. You can disconnect from the internet after the page has loaded and every tool will keep working, because there is nothing for it to talk to. Close the tab and the data is gone.

It also means the tools stay fast. There is no upload, no queue and no processing limit, so a huge document formats just as quickly as a small one.

What you will find here

The collection has grown to more than 170 tools across sixteen categories, and you can browse the full list on the all tools page. These are the largest groups.

Finance and property tools are the biggest part of the site now. Mortgage and amortization schedules, rental yield and cash flow for landlords, depreciation, closing costs and refinance breakeven. These follow published rules rather than rules of thumb, which is why they carry their sources.

Image and PDF tools do the file work your browser is genuinely good at. Compressing an image, converting a PDF to JPG, merging or splitting a document. The file never leaves your machine, which for a signed contract or a passport scan is the whole point.

Developer tools handle the small conversions that fill a debugging session, including the JSON formatter, the Base64 encoder and decoder and the cron expression generator.

Text, writing and generator tools measure and tidy words, or make something on demand. The word counter tracks words, characters, sentences and reading time as you type, the case converter switches between UPPERCASE, lowercase, Title Case and Sentence case, and the password generator produces keys your browser creates and nobody else ever sees.

Health, time, social, ecommerce, spreadsheet and marketing tools fill in the rest, from BMI and calorie estimates to time zone conversion and CSV cleanup.

Our promises

Free, and staying free. There is no premium tier, no trial period and no feature held back behind a paywall. Running costs are covered by unobtrusive advertising, which is why you may see ads on the site.

No accounts. We do not ask for your email, we do not build a profile of you, and there is nothing to log into. Open a tool, do the job, close the tab.

No uploads. Your text, files and data are processed locally and are never transmitted to us. You can read the full detail in our privacy policy.

No artificial limits. Paste a whole book into the word counter if you like. Generate a thousand passwords. Nothing is metered.

How we get the numbers right

A lot of what this site does now is arithmetic that people act on. A mortgage payment, a depreciation schedule, an overtime total, a due date. Getting those wrong quietly is worse than not offering them at all, so they are not written from memory.

Every calculator that follows a published rule is built against the published rule and checked against worked examples before it goes live. The depreciation tools follow the IRS tables in Publication 946, including the mid month convention that trips up most spreadsheets. The mileage tool carries both halves of a year when the IRS changes its rate mid year, because a single average quietly overpays one half and underpays the other. The PMI rules in our mortgage tools follow the thresholds set out in the Homeowners Protection Act rather than a lender's rounding. Where a rate moves, the field is editable and says so, instead of hiding a stale number inside the formula.

Where a tool follows a published rule, the page links out to the body that publishes it, so you can check the rule yourself rather than trusting us. Plenty of the others follow an industry convention rather than a regulation. A cap rate is defined by how the market uses it, not by a statute, and we would rather say that than dress a convention up as a law.

Where a result depends on something a calculator cannot see, such as your credit, your local tax rules or your medical history, the page says so next to the answer and points at our disclaimer. None of these tools is a substitute for a professional, and we would rather say that plainly than imply otherwise by staying quiet.

When a rule changes we update the tool and the page that explains it. If you find a figure you believe is wrong, tell us on the contact page and include the case, because that is the fastest way to get it fixed.

How the site keeps growing

New tools get added regularly, and the direction comes largely from the people using the site. When several people ask for the same thing, it moves up the list. Our rule for adding something new is that it should do one job properly, work without an account, and run locally like everything else here.

If a tool you need is missing, or you have spotted a bug or a confusing explanation, we would genuinely like to hear about it. The contact page has a short form that reaches us directly, and we read every message that comes through.