About Free Handy Tools
Free Handy Tools is 175 small calculators and converters for the awkward sums that come up at work and at home — a timesheet with unpaid breaks in it, a mortgage that compounds twice a year rather than twelve times, a shoe size written in another country’s numbering.
What it is
Every tool here does one job and states its assumptions while it does it. The Time Card Calculator shows where the overtime threshold was applied and how much of the week fell the other side of it. The Mortgage Calculator asks whether you want US monthly compounding or Canadian semi-annual compounding, because the same rate on the same loan produces two different payments. The Cooking Measurement Converter asks which ingredient you are measuring, because a cup of flour and a cup of water do not weigh the same thing.
That is the whole editorial position. Most free calculators are right about the easy case and quietly wrong about the details, and the details are usually the reason you went looking for a calculator. These try to be right about the details, and to show enough of the working that you can check the answer rather than take it on trust.
The catalogue is grouped into 12 areas — Work & Money, Text, Study & School, Developer, Security & Privacy, General, Health & Fitness, Fitness & Training, Home & Life, Cars & Driving, Date & Time, Conversions — and every tool is listed on the home page. There is no tool behind a login, because there are no logins.
How it works
The site is served as static files. There is no server-side calculation anywhere in it: when you type a number into a tool, the arithmetic runs in JavaScript on your own device, and the result never leaves it. There is no database, no account system, no sign-up and nothing to install. Open a tool, disconnect from the network, and it keeps working.
With one exception, and it is worth naming rather than glossing over. The Product Ingredient Checker sends the barcode you type to Open Food Facts to look the product up, only when you press Look up, because that is where the data lives and this site has no business keeping a copy of it. Everything else on the site is the offline claim above, exactly as written. The privacy policy sets out what that request contains and what it does not.
Each route is pre-rendered to a real HTML file at build time — its own title, its own description, its own canonical URL — so the pages are readable and indexable without running any JavaScript at all. The finished files are served as static assets. Nothing is generated per visitor, which is also why there is nothing per visitor to store.
The practical consequence: we could not hand over what you typed into the Password Generator or the JSON Formatter even if someone asked us to, because it was never sent anywhere. The privacy policy sets out the few things that do leave your browser, all of which are the ordinary mechanics of loading a web page.
Why it is free
There is no paid tier and no plan for one. The site is funded by advertising, which is what keeps it free and account-free. Google decides where each unit goes — that is what its automatic placement means, and saying so is more honest than publishing a map of the page we do not draw. What the arrangement does not decide is the rest of it, and these are the rules we hold ourselves to:
- The tool comes first. It is the first thing in the page and the first thing rendered, so the calculator you came for is what you get — the advertising is fitted around it, and none of it stands in front of it.
- Nothing full-screen and nothing that follows you. The two formats that would do it — the interstitial that covers the page between clicks, and the bar that sticks to the edge of the screen — are switched off for this site at the account level.
- Where this site reserves the space for an ad itself, the height is set in the stylesheet before the creative arrives, so the page does not jump under your cursor while you are typing.
- Nothing here depends on an ad loading. Blocked, failed or simply unsold, every tool behaves exactly the same — you can block the ad code outright and the site keeps working.
- No advertiser has ever influenced a result. Nobody can pay to change what a calculator returns, or to be recommended by one.
Who runs it
Free Handy Tools is the name this site is published under, and it is operated from the United States. It is a personal project rather than a company: it started because a timesheet calculator gave the wrong answer for a shift that crossed midnight, and it turned out the second one did too, and by the time the third one was wrong about unpaid breaks it seemed easier to write one properly.
There is no team page here because there is no team, and no company history because there is no company. That is the whole disclosure: a trading name, the country it is run from, and one route to the person who answers — the contact form, which reaches them directly and is read by nobody else.
That is still the whole idea. Each tool exists because some sum was genuinely awkward and the obvious calculators for it got a detail wrong. There is no roadmap, no backlog and nothing to sign up to — things get built when they become interesting enough to build, and fixed when somebody shows they are broken.
Which is the most useful thing you can send. If a tool gives you a number you can show is wrong, say so on the contact page: the tool, the exact inputs, the answer it gave and the answer you expected. Wrong answers get fixed ahead of everything else, because a calculator that is confidently wrong is worse than no calculator at all.
What stands behind the arithmetic is the sourcing rather than the author. Where a tool applies a rule somebody else published — a classification threshold, an equation, a standard size, a statutory band — its own prose names that source and the tool is written against it, so you can go and check the rule rather than take this site’s word for the number. A tool that cannot say where its figures come from has no business handing you one.