AppAndTools.com is home to a growing collection of mobile apps and more than 240 free online tools. The goal is simple: build small, well-made things that solve a real, everyday problem — without the clutter, the sign-ups or the hidden costs.
Most online utilities follow the same tired pattern. You upload your file to somebody else's server, wait, watch an interstitial, and get back a result with a watermark on it and a nudge to buy the pro plan. Your file, meanwhile, is sitting on a machine you know nothing about. We thought that was a bad deal, and modern browsers have quietly become powerful enough that it is no longer a necessary one.
Who is behind this site
Stephen Ho is the founder and sole developer of AppAndTools.com. The site is run from Incheon, South Korea.
Stephen Ho builds everything on this site himself — the mobile apps, the online tools, and the pages that explain how each one works. The idea behind all of it is the same: take something that is quietly annoying to do, and make it take thirty seconds instead of ten minutes. He reads every email sent to the support address and answers it personally.
What we make
- Mobile apps — native apps for Android and iOS, from a savings tracker to study and language-learning tools. Several are published in multiple languages. Browse them on the Apps page.
- Online tools — fast, free utilities that run directly in your web browser: PDF editing, image and video conversion, background removal, QR codes, calculators, timers, text and data tools, and developer utilities. See them all on the Tools page.
Privacy is the whole point
The large majority of our online tools run entirely in your browser. Your images, videos, PDFs and text are processed on your own device and are never uploaded to a server — so your data stays yours. Tools that work this way show a clear "100% private" badge.
This is not a promise you have to take on trust. You can check it: open a tool, disconnect from the internet, and use it. If it still works, nothing was ever being sent. That test works on most of the tools on this site.
It also means there is a short list of things we genuinely cannot do. We cannot recover a file you lost, because we never had a copy. We cannot look at your document to see what went wrong. We cannot resume a job that failed halfway. Those are the honest costs of processing everything on your own machine, and we think they are worth paying.
A small number of tools are unavoidable exceptions, and each says so on its own page. What Is My IP is the clearest example: your browser genuinely does not know your public IP address, so finding it requires asking a server. Where a tool has to reach the internet, it explains exactly why and exactly what leaves your device.
How a tool gets built
Most of them start as something we needed ourselves, or as something a reader asked for by email. The rest come from watching how badly the existing options behave — a converter that demands an account, a PDF tool that stamps its logo on your document, a calculator buried under five ad blocks.
Once a tool works, it gets a written page around it: what the thing actually is, where the format came from, what the common mistakes are, and what to do when it goes wrong. We would rather explain percent-encoding properly once than leave you guessing why your link broke. Those pages are written by hand, then translated into nine more languages so the explanation is not an English-only privilege.
Free, and how that works
Every tool on this site is free to use, with no account to create, no watermarks, no file-size paywall and no limit on how often you use them.
The site is paid for by advertising on the tool pages. We keep the ad slots to a small fixed number in fixed positions, and there are no ads at all on the app pages. There is no premium tier, so there is nothing to upsell you and no reason to make the free version worse on purpose.
Getting things wrong
With this many tools, some of them will have bugs, and some of the translations will be clumsy. We would much rather hear about it than not. If a tool gives you a wrong answer, or a sentence reads strangely in your language, tell us — those emails are the most useful ones we get, and they are usually fixed within a few days.
Get in touch
Questions, feedback, a feature idea or a bug to report? We would love to hear from you — email support@appandtools.com, or see the Contact page for what is most helpful to include. One person reads that inbox and you will get a real reply.