Here's a test. Open a new tab. Search for "json formatter online." Click the first result.
How many ads do you count above the fold? How many interstitial pop-ups did you dismiss to see the actual input field? Is the tool itself shoved into a narrow column between two skyscrapers of banner ads? Is the copy on the page written by a human or by a 2019-era SEO mill? Does the design look like it was styled in 2011 and never touched since?
That's the reason AppCrib exists.
AppCrib (appcrib.com) is our portfolio of free, browser-based utility tools. Developer tools, design tools, home and DIY tools, everyday essentials, and more as the collection grows. The tools are grouped into toolkits, each with its own landing page. The current toolkits include:
- Developer Tools: JSON, regex, timestamps, token decoding, that whole family
- Design: for designers and people who need design-adjacent things
- Home & DIY: calculators and estimators for projects
- Essentials: the everyday utilities that belong in everyone's toolbox
The list of toolkits expands as the collection does, and the tool count ticks up every week.
The tagline we landed on is "Modern. Fast. Private. Free." It's deliberately dry. The landing pages don't yell. The tools don't require an account. They don't track you across the web. They don't ask for your email. Most of them don't even send your data to a server; the work happens in your browser.
Why we built it this way
The utility-tool category is genuinely broken. I say that as someone who uses these tools constantly. A handful of them are good. A couple of JWT decoders, a couple of regex testers, a couple of reference sites. But the vast majority of free tools on the web today exist to serve ads to you, and the tool itself is a hostage situation.
We wanted to run the counterfactual. What if a utility tool site was built like someone cared about the craft? Clean design. Fast pages. No cookie banners you have to fight to close. No "sign in with Google to continue." No "upgrade to Pro to format more than 50 lines of JSON." Just the tool, the way it should have been all along.
We also wanted to be honest about monetization. These tools are ad-supported. That's the deal. The ads live in reasonable places, they don't follow your cursor, and they don't hijack the page. AppCrib will never be subscription-gated. That's an explicit rule, baked into how we think about this tier of product. Ads are it.
The interesting part is underneath
The reason we can build this many tools without them feeling slapped together is that they all share the same foundation. One domain, one design system, one deployment setup, one analytics configuration, one ad stack. Adding a new tool doesn't mean spinning up a new project, buying a new domain, configuring new DNS, or registering with a new ad network. It means dropping a new tool into a structure that already has all of those things resolved.
None of that is visible to a visitor, and it shouldn't be. What it means in practice is that we can spend our time on the parts that matter: whether the tool works, whether the copy is clear, whether it belongs in the toolkit it's in. Not on the twentieth re-solve of a problem we've already solved. Compound that across dozens of tools and the math starts to favor us.
A site like ours doesn't need any single tool to be a hit. It needs the whole collection to form something a visitor wants to come back to. If you came for a timestamp converter and stayed for a regex tester, we've done our job.
Where we are with the rest of the stack
A lot of this post is the shiny version. Here's the less shiny version.
Ad networks are a moving target. The secondary networks we eventually want are mostly gated behind traffic thresholds we haven't cleared yet, and a few we won't touch at all on principle. So the revenue side of this is a phased ramp, not a flip of a switch.
Paid acquisition has a learning curve. We run paid campaigns on a handful of channels, and we're still figuring out the right allocation across them. What's become obvious fast is that specificity beats breadth: toolkit-scoped targeting with toolkit-scoped copy outperforms a blanket "drop everyone on the homepage" setup by a wide margin.
Classifiers will occasionally misread us. When your tool names include invented words, automated systems sometimes flag the ads for reasons that have nothing to do with the ads themselves. It's a category of issue you can't plan for, you just work through it when it shows up.
The next few months
Short list of what's coming:
- Sharper analytics wiring, so we can move past proxy signals and start tracking actual tool usage.
- More tools in every toolkit, so paid campaigns have more targeted landing pages to send people to. Specificity beats breadth.
- More toolkits as the collection grows. We've got candidates on the list.
- A "suites" concept. Grouped collections of tools designed around a use case rather than a category. A "starting a podcast" suite. A "closing on a house" suite. Stuff that makes AppCrib feel less like a tool index and more like a workshop you visit on purpose.
If you've been to AppCrib already, thanks for the traffic, genuinely. If you haven't, you can find us at appcrib.com. The tools are free, we don't want your email, and we'd rather you close the tab and come back next week than sign you up for a newsletter you didn't ask for.
Next post: clean, modern, private. Three words every company claims, and what we actually mean when we use them.