I built the dev toolbox I kept wishing existed

Every developer has a small set of tools they reach for constantly. Mine: a JSON formatter, a JWT decoder, diff, Base64, a regex tester, and the occasional cron explainer.

For years, my workflow for these was: Google the tool, land on whichever site ranks first, dismiss a popup or two, use it, close the tab. Repeat tomorrow on a different site. Every tool lived somewhere else, each with its own UI, its own quirks, and usually a design that hadn’t been touched in a decade. Not terrible, just tired.

There are good all-in-one toolboxes out there, but the ones I found were desktop apps. That always felt strange to me. Formatting JSON doesn’t need an install. None of this stuff does. It’s text in, text out. The browser is more than enough.

So I built Hexbench. It’s the collection of tools I actually use, in one place, on the web.

There are 23 tools right now: formatters, encoders, converters, generators, and inspectors. JSON, JWT, diff, hash, regex, Base64, cron, timestamp, the usual suspects, plus some I kept needing like SVG to JSX and JSON to TypeScript.

A few things I cared about while building it:

Fast. Pages load instantly, and switching tools feels like switching tabs, not navigating a website. You only ever load the tool you’re using. And big pastes don’t freeze the tab, the heavy work happens off the main thread.

Clean. No signup, no ads, no popups. A command palette (Cmd+K) to jump anywhere, dark mode, and a modern UI that stays out of the way. This was a big one for me, most tool sites work fine but feel old. And every tool has its own URL, so you can bookmark the ones you use and skip the homepage entirely.

Private. Everything runs in your browser, so nothing you paste ever leaves the page. And that’s not a privacy policy, it’s enforced by how the thing is built.

To be honest, I don’t use all 23 daily. A handful I use constantly, and the rest earned their spot by being things I kept googling for. It’s a personal toolbox that grew.

It’s at hexbench.app. No install, no signup. Click a tool and start using.

I’m open to adding more tools. What’s the one you always end up googling for?