CASE STUDY · Tools
Free, stateless, browser-only: the two glincker utilities that did not earn product status became a clean tools hub with full SEO surface and zero backend.
Three small tools, one /tools hub, zero accounts
PROBLEM
The problem
When we audited the glincker sitemap, two tools came out of the triage without a product home: a profanity filter and a markdown converter. Both are useful, neither has a user state story worth building a backend for, and the market is well-served at every price point including free. Giving them product treatment would have been waste. Killing them entirely would have thrown away real SEO surface area and funnel entry points. A tools hub threads the needle: useful pages, zero operational cost, zero abuse vectors.
APPROACH
Our approach
The guiding constraint was that nothing leaves the browser. No API calls, no server-side logging of user text, no analytics on content. Every tool is pure client-side React: text in, transformed text out, nothing persisted anywhere. That constraint also eliminates the entire backend abuse surface for tools that accept arbitrary user input.
The profanity scanner ships with a 50-word inline word list (MIT-licensed source, documented in the component). The detection logic is a single regex pass with word-boundary anchors. The word list has a clear upgrade path: swap in a maintained library when the bundle budget allows. We did not reach for a dependency in v1 because the inline list covers the common case and keeps the component self-contained.
The markdown converter uses an inline regex parser in v1. The parser handles headings, bold, italic, code blocks, and links. There is a TODO in the component pointing at `marked` as the replacement when we add it to the bundle. The same upgrade-path discipline: ship something useful now, document the ceiling, replace it without ceremony later.
The copy on both tools leads with: nothing leaves your tab. That is a trust signal, not marketing — it is literally what the code does. We kept it in the UI because commodity tool users have been burned by paste-your-text-here services that log inputs.
OUTCOME
What shipped and what we learned.
Three utility pages shipped (Profanity, Markdown, Tools index), zero backend services involved, zero auth required, zero abuse surface exposed. The OG images and sitemap entries derive automatically from the existing registry pattern, so both tools have full SEO coverage from day one.
STACK
Technology stack
SCREENS
What it looks like.
