Toolumen is live: free web tools for people who ship
Toolumen is live: free web tools for people who ship
For centuries, Ancient Egypt's mysteries remained hidden in hieroglyphs—a lost language—until the Rosetta Stone unlocked its secrets, revolutionizing history.
In 1799, during Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign, French soldiers discovered a large black basalt slab in Rosetta (now Rashid). Standing 44 inches tall and weighing 1,600 pounds, this artifact later became the key to decoding hieroglyphs.
Deciphering the Code: For decades, scholars worked to crack the linguistic puzzle. It was Jean-François Champollion, a French linguist, who made the breakthrough in 1822.
By comparing the Greek text to the hieroglyphs, he identified phonetic symbols corresponding to royal names like Ptolemy and Cleopatra.
Why we built Toolumen
Every web project accumulates a hundred tiny chores. Minify an embed so it fits under a platform limit. Double-check that a page's title and meta description actually say something. Confirm a link unfurls cleanly when someone drops it into Slack or iMessage. Convert a client's HEIC photos into something a browser can display. None of these are hard. All of them are friction.
For years we solved that friction with a drawer of one-off scripts and bookmarked utilities — some ours, some scattered across the internet behind ad walls, sign-up gates, and "upload your file to our server" privacy gambles. It worked, but it was messy, and it wasn't something we could hand to a client or a teammate.
Toolumen is that drawer, cleaned up and put on the web for everyone. It lives at toolumen.com: a growing suite of free, no-login web tools, each one built because we needed it ourselves.
What's available today
The first set covers the chores we hit most often shipping Webflow and custom sites:
- Embed Minifier — Webflow caps custom-code embeds at 50,000 characters. Paste your HTML, CSS, and JS and Toolumen strips the dead weight so a big component actually saves. It's how our own navbar fits.
- SEO Audit — a fast, honest read on a page's title, meta description, headings, and structured data, with plain-language fixes instead of a vanity score.
- Open Graph Preview — see exactly how a URL looks when it's shared on social and in chat apps, before you publish and find out the hard way.
- Image & HEIC Converter — turn iPhone HEICs and oversized PNGs into web-ready, compressed files without uploading anything to a stranger's server.
- Contrast Checker — confirm type and UI clear accessibility contrast ratios so the work is readable for everyone.
The principles behind it
Three rules shape every tool we add.
Free, and actually free. No account, no trial countdown, no "export is premium." If a tool is useful, it's useful without a credit card.
Private by default. Wherever it's technically possible, the work happens in your browser. Your embed code, your images, and your URLs don't need a round trip through our servers for a job the browser can do locally.
Built from real work. We don't brainstorm tools in the abstract. Each one earns its place by saving us time on actual client projects first. If it survives our own daily use, it ships.
Where it's going
Toolumen is in beta, and the roadmap is just our own to-do list made public: more converters, more pre-flight checks for Webflow and Shopify, and small generators for the boilerplate everyone rewrites. If there's a chore you'd love to delete from your week, that's exactly what we want to hear about.
Go kick the tires at toolumen.com. It's free, it's fast, and there's nothing to sign up for.
"Proper web development enables businesses to capture attention in ways not possible before."
“Browsing ancient artifacts and uncovering the historical context of the stories on each relic was a timeless experience”
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