delphitools Review: 50+ Free Privacy-First Browser Tools That Never Phone Home

Every so often you find a corner of the web that reminds you what it used to feel like. delphitools is one of those corners: a collection of 50+ small, focused utilities — QR generators, background removers, colour pickers, print imposers — with no login wall, no cookie banner, no “upgrade to Pro” nag. The About page says it plainly: “No logins, no registration, no data collection. I can’t believe I have to say that. Long live the handmade web.” After a week of using it, we’re inclined to salute.

What is delphitools?

delphitools (at delphi.tools) is a free collection of browser-based utilities made by a single developer who goes by delphi. The organising idea is “small, low stakes and low effort” — each tool does one job, loads instantly, and processes everything locally in your browser. Nothing you drop into these tools is uploaded anywhere; close the tab and it’s gone. The whole collection is open source under the 0BSD license — the most permissive license that exists, effectively public domain — so you can take any of it, fork it, or ship it in your own product.

The greatest hits

It goes deeper than you expect

The catalogue keeps unfolding: typography tools (font file explorer, glyph browser, line-height and typographic-scale calculators), image utilities (converter, splitter, stitcher, tracer, SVG optimiser, favicon generator), and a genuinely rare print section — PDF preflight, a print imposer, and a zine imposer, which tells you exactly what kind of web this site belongs to. There are calculators (scientific, graphing, algebra, unit conversion), developer utilities (regex tester, meta tag generator, encoders, a Tailwind cheat sheet), and a category the site honestly labels “Turbo-nerd Shit”, where you’ll find things like a Shavian transliterator and a cipher decoder. Nobody builds a zine imposer for growth reasons. This is a labour of love, and it shows.

The privacy model is the product

Most “free” web tools are free because you’re the input: files get uploaded, processed server-side, and retained under a privacy policy nobody reads. delphitools inverts that completely. The tools ship as code to your browser and run there — the background remover, the image converter, the PDF tools, all of it. There is no server waiting for your files, no account to attach behaviour to, and no analytics script watching you work. For anyone handling client work, unreleased product shots, or anything under NDA, “the file never leaves my machine” isn’t a nice-to-have — it’s the whole reason to switch.

The ethos: handmade web, all the way down

This is the part that made us grin. delphitools doesn’t just refuse to monetise you — it refuses your money outright. The About page asks that instead of donating, you give to Wikipedia or the EFF and email proof, and you’ll get credited. There’s a stickers page with free high-res sticker art to print and slap on your laptop, an open invitation for artists to email in their work, and a “Friends of Delphi” section linking out to other handmade corners of the web. The version string in the footer is a git commit hash. Every detail says the same thing: made by a person, for people.

What could be better

Honesty section. Substrata carries a beta label and earns it — it’s already good, but you’ll occasionally bump into rough edges. Because everything runs client-side, heavyweight jobs (huge images, big PDFs) are bounded by your device, not a beefy server. And the no-accounts principle cuts both ways: there’s no sync, no history, no cloud saves — your work lives and dies in the tab. None of these are flaws so much as the honest price of the architecture, but you should know the trade you’re making.

Verdict

delphitools is what the web looks like when someone builds for the joy of it: 50+ genuinely useful tools, zero dark patterns, and a privacy model most funded startups couldn’t afford to copy. Bookmark it for the QR generator or the background remover, stay for the discovery that half your paid single-purpose tools have a free, local, private equivalent here. delphitools asks nothing of you — which, in 2026, might be the most radical feature a product can ship.