Paid tools you can replace with a browser tab

Browsers got quietly, dramatically more capable. Work that needed a licensed desktop application ten years ago now runs in a tab, on your own machine, without the file leaving it.

Two things make this worth caring about. It is free, obviously. But the better property is that the good ones are local: the file is processed by your own browser, so there is no upload, no queue, no copy sitting on a stranger's server. That distinction matters far more for a signed contract than for a meme.

Here are the jobs where a tab is genuinely the right tool now.

Shrink an image without guessing

Squoosh shows the original and the compressed version side by side with a slider, so you stop exporting at "quality 80" out of habit and start seeing where an image actually falls apart. Usually far lower than you would dare.

Everything happens in the browser. Catch: one image at a time, no batch, and development has been quiet for a while.

Open a PSD on a machine that has never had Photoshop

Photopea opens PSD, XD, Sketch and RAW files with layers, masks and adjustments intact. Handing someone a layered file and having them open it on a borrowed laptop is genuinely useful.

Catch: ad-supported unless you pay, and big files make the tab work.

Draw the diagram before the argument

Excalidraw opens instantly with nothing to sign into. The deliberately hand-drawn style is the feature: it reads as a sketch, so people discuss the idea instead of the alignment.

Catch: that same look is wrong for anything that must appear finished.

Edit and sign a PDF without uploading it

This is the one where "free online tool" usually means "upload your document to us". A signed agreement, a passport scan, a bank statement — those are exactly the files that should not be posted to a stranger's server to have a page rotated.

Our PDF editor does merge, split, reorder, rotate, delete pages and signatures entirely in the browser. Nothing is uploaded, because there is nowhere to upload it to. There is a longer piece on why that matters: how to sign a PDF without uploading it anywhere.

Make a QR code that still works next year

Most free QR generators route the code through their own domain so they can charge you later or count the scans. If that redirect ever lapses, every printed copy dies.

Our QR generator encodes the destination directly, so nothing sits between the code and the URL. Every type, every style, no account, no watermark. The trade-off is real and worth understanding: static versus dynamic, and who owns the redirect.

Export every app icon size at once

If you ship an app, you know the tedium: dozens of exact pixel sizes across iOS, macOS, Android and Chrome, each wrong in a way the store notices.

Our icon generator takes one square source and emits the whole set, and the screenshot resizer does the same for store screenshots. Both run locally. The sizes are the ones we ship ourselves — the full table is in the icon size cheat sheet.

Check a store listing before you pay someone to

Our ASO audit scores an App Store or Google Play listing — icon, title, subtitle, screenshots, description — and ranks the fixes by what each is worth. It will tell you unflattering things about your own app, which is the point of an audit.

When you should still pay

Being fair about the limits, because a list like this usually is not:

• Batch work. Tabs are built around one file. Three hundred images want a real desktop tool or a script.
• Colour-critical output. Print work, wide-gamut, ICC profiles — none of this is browser territory.
• Anything on a deadline with support attached. Free tools owe you nothing. If a failure costs you a client, buy the thing with a support address.
• Daily professional use. If a tool is how you earn a living, pay for it. The good desktop applications are worth their price, and the people who make them should keep making them.

The point is not that paid software is a scam. It is that a lot of us are carrying subscriptions for jobs we do four times a year, which a tab now does properly and locally.

Every tool of ours mentioned here is on the free tools page. No account, nothing uploaded.