Though I empathise with the OP, I feel that SaaS tools now need to add much more value in order to be sellable or appeal to the audience.

The factors that used to influence the build vs. buy decision are now changing. Earlier, even small tools like Canny (which shows your product roadmap to your customers), link-in-bio tools, or even Calendly used to sell well. I foresee that changing.

There was someone on HN who shared a collection of dozens of single purpose local/offline web apps for things like file conversions, I think image cropping, and other one-offs like that. Anyone remember?

Nice thing about local PWAs is you serve them statically, CDNs make bandwidth cheap, way fewer vulnerabilities for the host, and all the compute cost is paid by the user's browser.

I'm not sure I understand the intended message here. The author seems to describe their own project as "cover[ed] ... with invasive advertising" while saying that new technology accomplishes the same outcomes "faster, cheaper, and [with less maintenance burden]". So what exactly has been ruined?

In this particular case - good riddance. Such tools should not require a round-trip to an ad-infested website on the other side of the world. The crucial issue is that in the process you have to trust the owner (and perhaps ad network owners) with your data. Even if you want a round trip, you could have a static page somewhere on GitHub. The fact that the models made this business model obsolete is not necessarily a bad thing.

Last non-retired archived version: <https://web.archive.org/web/20260722191742/https://www.freef...>

From Gemini,

> FreeFormatter.com [was] a popular online utility website that provides free formatting, validation, conversion, and minification tools for developers, data professionals, and web administrators working with code and data structures like JSON, XML, HTML, SQL, and Java

Makes sense. Great exit letter.

I don't know if this website specifically did it, but a lot of other similar websites provide such services in a very bad way, for example base64encode.org and base64decode.org send your data to the server instead of using JS, and no one knows what they do with it.

I do understand that some still prefer browsers with JS disabled, but a website could probably detect this and default to in-browser processing, while reserving server-side to those edge cases.

Sure enough, even after the demise of the internet, the humble cookie consent banner still asks to share our personal information.

Rather than saying LLM directly replaced it... isn't it because people can now use LLM to obtain tools like converters they previously couldn't find (due to the hassle), or create them themselves through code generation?

I could be sad this was gone if I had any idea what it was.

I really liked freeformatter.com . Used it all the time. To those that build, host, and serve single-function websites, that (yes) can be easily replicated with AI, I salute you. Thank you for your service.

Why the free advertising for AI? There are thousands of code formatters starting with GNU indent, linters etc.

Oh wow, my little online tool only just launched...

I suspect it will reincarnate in a different form.

Gotta love the complaining about cookie banners while also showing a cookie banner.

What a shame. This was a really valuable resource and now it's just gone. Not because the author doesn't want to compete, not because they don't want to do it anymore, but because industry rolled over them

This has a very similar feel to me like local stores closing up because Walmart showed up next door, or beloved used bookstores dying because Amazon exists. Everything good in life right now is being churned into productivity and profit by hyper capital. The result is we all live "better" but poorer lives

Sorry for the rant. I'm also on the verge of giving up, so this hits me very hard

From the sounds of it - Devutils on MacOS is an excellent offline (native app) slop-free alternative and the license is worth it for the extra functions and supporting the developer. Boop is free, open source and also great.

Not sure what to suggest for Linux or Windows. I think I remember seeing something similar on Flathub for Linux but the name eludes me atm.

Another great resource gone. I often use tools like this for quick conversions or cleanups. Always admired sites like this and wondered how people paid for and maintained them for so long. Continues the sad trend of sites and people going offline.

Meanwhile AI has created 10x as many corners, some even open source and without the expectation of being for-profit.