Handpicked No-Signup Tools

I feel like I shouldn't trust an encryption website by the British NSA not to steal my data, but given a million other people must have had the same thought, and that it's open source, maybe someone would have noticed by now.

For anyone who isn't convinced yet: it can not just do all those things, it can chain them. You can build a pipeline jist by dragging and dropping blocks, with live results and even recommendations when some formats are detected .

During a reverse engineering project I built this to extract some audio data from a very strange API: string replace | json parse + query | base64 decode | gunzip | add wav header. Switching to zstd and a different bitrate took 2 clicks. Really helped me stay "in the zone" while working - having to open up a code editor and Python docs to write this from scratch would've taken me completely out of it and wasted a significant amount of time.

Came here to say this too. A super useful addition to this website would be a blurb on each tool page that discloses how they make their money to keep the lights on, and what their privacy policy looks like. If they're fully supported by donations (or paid users, but have a no-account freemium plan somehow), and have a strong privacy policy, great! But if they support themselves by granting themselves a perpetual-use license to anything you upload, and sell whatever data on you they can, that's... not so great.

Thank you! I've spent far too much time in HandBrake when I could've been using this. You have improved my life

I've had a bash script in my PATH that uses ffmpeg exactly to do this for the longest time. This is great!

Looks like this does the work on the server? I wonder if it could be done in WebAssembly to avoid the round trip and server load?

Good point. I'm very wary of submitting anything security sensitive to an unfamiliar web site, especially one I don't have a business relationship with.

If you have a business relationship with them (i.e. give them money), they're less likely to do something bad with your data since it may cause you to stop giving them money.

That's why I won't use tools like an online PDF tool when I'm dealing with PDFs that contain sensitive information.

That wouldn't do any good; these are network services, so they could always add attack code after the vetting, or perform a de-anonymization attack (trivial if you're not using TOR, potentially jury-riggable (eg based on what files you use them on) even if you are) and send it only to targeted visitors.

I bookmarked this two months ago--what a fantastic utility!

Agree. They only let you download a low resolution version of your image by default. To download full resolution, sign up is required, and to use it again will require getting credits if you want to download full resolution of those other images.

Should not be considered a “no-signup tool” imo

the FOSS community might disagree with this statement

Or it could be some dude’s personal tool that’s easier to also make available to others. I do that a lot because remembering a custom domain is quicker than some CLI incantation.

For example: https://techletter.app – I use it to construct my newsletters. Markdown with a few customizations into HTML for WYSIWYG editors. It’s cheap enough to run that I don’t care if others use it. I think the AWS credits add up to $3/mo.

This is a good point.

There should be separate categories for FOSS and no-hidden-monetization tools v.s. the other fly-in-the-soup tools where you have to drink around the fly...

We’ve put mindwendel[0] out for free - no tracking, no ads, no data harvesting.

It’s a tool to brainstorm and vote on ideas.

We did so because we are using it ourselves and the resource usage is so low it doesn’t cost us more to share it with others.

[0] https://www.mindwendel.com/

Preview, despite its name, does this really well. Its freeform drawing tools are a little different (shapes and lines are vector, not pixel) but they're very easy to use.

You can do this with Preview → Annotations

You can have the annotations palette always displayed. I haven't used MSPaint since the Windows XP days, but I don't think it can be any easier than this.

I would take a screenshot of part of my screen (CMND+Shift+4), mark up the screenshot with a red box then send.

A screenshot is plenty high res enough already. If anything you’ll want to shrink or before sending.

I like photopea nowadays.

I mostly need to do that kind of thing on screenshots. The Flameshot app has worked really well for taking screenshots and annotating them.

https://flameshot.org/

This used to be a great tool but hasn’t worked for me since 5-7 years. Maybe it can be implemented in Web3.0 to make it more reliable?

I just checked it out. That's a really cool drawing tool. I love how it allows you to give a hand-drawn feel to your drawings and diagrams.

Search for waifu2x websites, there are tons on the internet. Here's one: https://waifu2x.io/

Heck, a pencil worked great back when I was a kid!

As someone who has to deal with IT security, I will never install anything local if I can avoid it.

Why install software, if I can do this quickly in a browser, especially if I need to do this only once?

Resume is understandable, if there are themes to choose from (kinda like Overleaf).

RemoveBG is very good at what it does, and it certainly would be nice if there was an offline version. However, there isn't, and I don't think you'll find an offline tool that comes close in terms of quality of result.

There are cases were privacy of data isn't a real concern - e.g. you're about to publish the resulting file anyway. If you need to keep your data private, then sure, don't pipe it through an online tool. But that doesn't mean the usescases aren't there.

Why? Because 99% of the world's population prefers it.

Because of the sandboxing browsers provide.

The barrier to install native software should be very, very high. It is like having unprotected sex with someone. There needs to be a high level of trust and a long term commitment.

Using a website on the other hand is like exchanging a few nice words. You can do that with a stranger, without much risk.

It is also easier to handle. A website can be bookmarked and usually loads in a second or so.

Websites are also easy to customize. Usually you can bookmark individual pages directly. Often with the parameters you regularly need. You can zoom in and out of the interface. You can customize the HTML and CSS and even the functionality via bookmarklets.

And you can link to websites and everybody - independent of their OS - can instantly use it.

A lot of people would rather use a single use web site than install a program and learn how to use it. There may be valid reasons to download and install a program but I can't even convince anyone to install a password manager so if my friends ask me how to remove a background on a pick I'm more likely to point them to a website than a program.

You're already making the assumption that people use desktop or laptop systems and can actually install software; what if they don't have administrator access? What if they're using a chromebook? What if they're on mobile? What if they don't know Latex? And LibreOffice is kinda... ugly and slow in my opinion.

They're low-barrier alternatives to the options you provide, and that's absolutely fine.

In short, because dedicated developers making one-off projects that do one thing well (a la the Unix philosophy) can serve it over the internet easier than making standalone cross-platform apps.

RemoveBG, for example, does a FAR better job (in less than a second) than manual lassoing, feathering, etc. Eventually Photoshop added a similar feature, but not until RemoveBG and its ilk were on the web for a few years. I'm not sure if GIMP has similar auto-bg removal, or if it works as well... but even if it did, it's still more of a learning curve than "upload picture and push remove". Even after two decades of Photoshop usage, it's still faster for me to use RemoveBG to create, say, a new Slack emoji... often I can finish before Photoshop even finishes loading.

For resumes, I use Kickresume all the time because they make the process FAR easier than creating a similar thing from scratch in Illustrator, InDesign, or Word. Unlike a dumb template, the resume websites understand the "semantics" of a resume (as in, this section is your employment history, this is your skills, this is your references) and can theme them intelligently, such as displaying skills as numbers, stars, progress bars, or words ("Advanced", "Beginner"), or easily reformatting the dates for you. Then it saves all your resumes, one per employer, in its own easy to use cloud storage. When submitting a bunch of applications (because I'm not fancy enough to have a huge personal network), it takes the time-per-resume from hours down to minutes. It's a huge timesaver.

Email signature: Agreed, HTML sigs are overkill.

Profile picture: Again, like RemoveBG, it's so much easier to use this than having to learn a vector graphics program, manipulating/centering circles, adding strokes and fills, figuring how to properly place text inside a shape (THIS circle, not that one, and flowing this way, not that!), etc.

There's nothing wrong with desktop apps for complex use cases (Office is still way better on the desktop than on the web, for example) but for one-offs, having an easy web app to go to and get the job done in a few seconds is waaaaaaay easier.

Not all of us on HN are ideological purists. No way I'm going to bother with LibreOffice and the JVM and Latex just to make a resume when a website can have it done in 5-10 min in a WYSIWYG and zero learning curve.