Restless Forge

What This Is

Restless Forge is a one-person workshop. Every tool here started as a problem I actually had — working out whether a job was worth the commute, wanting to see how a design would sit on my arm before booking a tattoo, trying to get a photograph onto a kinetic sand table without it looking like corduroy. Each one got built properly rather than abandoned as a half-finished script.

There is no freemium tier, no trial, and no upgrade page. The tools are free because they are cheap to run: they execute in your browser, so there is no per-user cost that would need recovering. Advertising covers the hosting bill. That is the entire business model, and stating it plainly seems better than pretending there isn't one.

Browser-First, and Why That Matters

Almost everything here runs entirely on your device. When you upload an image to convert, or type a salary into a calculator, that data is processed by JavaScript running in your tab and is never transmitted anywhere. This is not a privacy policy promise that could quietly change next year — for these tools there is no server to send anything to, so there is nothing to change.

A small number of tools genuinely cannot work that way. Generating song lyrics means calling a language model, and doing that from the browser would mean handing an API key to every visitor. Those tools are marked with a ☁ Cloud-assisted badge on their card, described in the privacy policy, and carry their own page spelling out exactly what leaves your browser. The badge exists so the question "does this send my data anywhere?" is answerable at a glance instead of by reading source code.

From the Workshop

Longer-form essays on tools, time, and the maker philosophy — plus articles written from the engines themselves: how a sand table's coordinate system works, what an applicant tracking system actually measures, where invoice rounding goes wrong.

Start with Why I Build These Tools or the technical tour in How a Tool Gets Built.