Article - We built developer tools that keep your data on your machine

We built empinet.dev because we needed it ourselves.

There are small things we do almost every day as developers. Format a JSON response so we can actually read it. Decode something in Base64. Compare two pieces of text. Convert a file from one format to another.

Usually, you search for a tool, open a website, paste your data, and get on with your work.

But that paste is the part that always made us uncomfortable.

Where is this JSON going?

You have a JSON response from an application you're working on. It's a mess to read, so you find a JSON formatter website. Then, just before pasting it, you stop for a second.

Does this run in my browser? Is it sending the whole thing to a server? Who runs that server? Is any of this being stored?

That response might contain customer information, internal configuration, or something you simply don't want to share. Even when it doesn't, you shouldn't have to wonder where it goes just to add some indentation.

We aren't saying every formatter website uploads your input. Plenty of tools process it locally. We wanted a collection we could use ourselves, with that decision built into how the tools work.

So we made the tools we wanted to use

At Empinet, we build software and help businesses with their technology. We're also developers doing the same everyday work as the people we're building these tools for.

empinet.dev is our collection of free developer tools. It includes JSON formatting, validation and repair, data conversions, encoders and decoders, JWT inspection, text comparison, image utilities, and more.

The important part: the data you paste into a tool, or the file you select, is processed locally in your browser. It isn't uploaded to our servers for processing.

So if you need to format a JSON response, the formatting happens on your machine. If you need to compress an image, the image is processed there too. There's no account to create before you can use the tools.

To be clear about the privacy claim, the website uses Google Analytics for site usage measurement. Local tool processing means your tool input isn't sent to a server for the transformation; it doesn't mean the website makes no network requests.

For developers like us

We wanted somewhere we could keep coming back to for these little tasks, without wondering whether we were handing our data to an unknown server.

That's why we built it. And since we need these tools, we figured other developers probably do too.

You can try them at empinet.dev. If something is missing, confusing, or doesn't work the way you'd expect, we'd like to hear about it.