I Built Fastools: 70+ Free Browser Tools for Images, Video, PDF, and Everyday Dev Work I got tired of opening five different “free tool” sites every week—one for image compression, one for QR codes, one for Base64, another for a quick mortgage or tax estimate—and half of them buried the useful button under ads. So I built Fastools: a single hub of 70+ free online tools, with each tool living on its own subdomain (for example, image tools, video tools, JSON helpers), and a bilingual index so English and Chinese users can find what they need quickly. What Fastools is Fastools is a Toolhub: click a card → open a focused tool → do the job → leave. Categories include: Image — compress, watermark, merge, cutout / background remove, ID photo, EXIF, favicon, SVG helpers, and more Video & audio — trim, compress, reverse, merge, extract audio, size checks Documents — PDF / Office-related converters (Word ↔ PDF, Markdown → PDF, CSV ↔ Excel, etc.) Dev / text — JSON, Base64, URL encode, encrypt/decrypt, timestamps, QR, password generator, OCR Finance & life — mortgage, compound interest, tax, BMI, lunar calendar, retirement helpers, and similar calculators Start here: Hub: https://www.fastools.cc/en Index (full list): https://index.fastools.cc/en/ Design choices that mattered 1. One job per site Each tool is a small product, not a mega-dashboard. That keeps pages fast and SEO-friendly: people searching for “compress image online” land on a page that only does that. 2. Prefer browser-side processing when possible For many image/video/text tasks, work happens in the browser (Web APIs / WASM where needed). That usually means: fewer uploads to a random server better privacy for everyday files lower hosting cost as traffic grows (Some flows still need a backend; the goal is “local first,” not “never any server.”) 3. Bilingual from day one Chinese and English routes / sites sit side by side. If you ship tools globally, i18n is product work, not a later rewrite. 4. A registry-driven multi-site setup New tools follow a repeatable pattern: add an app, register metadata, wire the subdomain. That sounds boring—and that’s the point. Consistency is how you ship the 20th tool without chaos. Who it’s for Developers who need a quick encode/decode, JSON tidy, QR, or password Designers / marketers compressing or watermarking images Anyone who wants a calculator without installing an app People who prefer no signup for small one-off tasks What I’m optimizing for next Better discovery (search + related tools) Clearer English copy on every tool page Performance and accessibility polish More “task-shaped” guides (how-to pages that match real search queries) Try it If you have 30 seconds, pick one task you do often—compress an image, generate a QR code, Base64 something, or check a video file—and try it on Fastools: https://www.fastools.cc/en Feedback is welcome: which tool do you open weekly that still feels annoying on the open web? That’s the backlog that matters.