About ToolsTray
Hi — I'm Ramsudharsan Manoharan, a software engineer, and ToolsTray is a one-person project. Every tool here exists because at some point I needed it, searched for it, and landed on a page that wanted an email address before it would crop a PDF.
Why I built it
The pattern repeats. You need to trim an audio clip or convert a spreadsheet, and the top results are slow, stacked with pop-ups, and quietly upload your file to someone's server. For a thirty-second task that is a bad trade. So I started building my own versions, small and fast, with no account and no dark patterns, and kept going. The catalog now holds 148 tools: calculators, converters, PDF and image editors, audio and video utilities, and a shelf of developer tools I use myself most days.
It started as one page. I needed to know how many days were left before a deadline, got a site full of interstitials, and wrote my own in an evening. The second tool came a week later for the same reason, and after about a dozen it stopped being a set of one-offs and became a project with a name.
Where your files go (mostly nowhere)
The engineering choice I care most about is that nearly everything runs inside your browser, with WebAssembly doing the heavy lifting. Video transcoding, PDF rendering, even the AI models behind transcription and background removal. For those tools your files never leave your device: open the network tab and nothing carrying them goes out. What you can see there is a tool pulling down its model or engine on a first run — that comes down, and what you handed it stays put. Each page carries a badge stating plainly where its processing happens, on-device or server, and naming any third-party service involved. I have written about how that works in a post on the blog.
This is a real constraint rather than a slogan, and it costs something. A model has to be small enough to download once and run on a mid-range phone, which is why the background remover leaves rough edges on flyaway hair. I would rather ship the honest limitation and say so on the page than send your photo to a server. Where a tool genuinely cannot work locally, its badge says server and names who receives the data.
How I decide what to build
Roughly half the catalog came from a job I hit myself. Most of the rest came from someone telling me what they were stuck on. I do not build a tool because a keyword looks profitable; if a page cannot say something true and specific about the job it does, it does not get made. Each one ships with its own tests, and the whole catalog is gated on those tests passing before anything reaches the live site.
How it's funded
Free tools are kept free by unobtrusive advertising. At most a single lazy-loaded unit per page, never a pop-up and never anything between you and your result, plus the occasional clearly marked recommendation that may earn a commission. A recommendation never changes what a tool does. If premium tools ever appear they will be labelled as such, and the free tools stay free.
What ToolsTray runs on
The site is a static build with no backend of its own, served from a CDN, and it works offline once you have loaded it. Everything a tool downloads to your device, including AI models and the runtimes that execute them, is listed on the storage page with its size and a button to remove it. Nothing is kept without telling you where to find it.
Suggest a tool
Missing something you would use? Tell me on the contact page. A good share of the catalog started as a request or a complaint.