Free online tools that never upload your files

Why browser-based tools are better for you

When you compress a photo on most free websites, the file is copied to a server you know nothing about, processed there, and sent back. That design made sense fifteen years ago, when browsers couldn't do much on their own. It doesn't now. Modern browsers ship with Canvas, WebAssembly and the File API — enough to resize a photo, redraw a QR code, or run an amortization schedule without a network round-trip.

The practical differences add up. There's no upload wait, so a 12 MB photo is ready in the time it takes to read this sentence. There's no queue at busy times, because you're using your own processor rather than sharing someone else's. There's no file-size ceiling imposed to protect a server bill. And there's no copy of your document sitting in storage governed by a retention policy you didn't read.

That last point matters more than it sounds for the things people actually put into these tools: a signed contract that needs compressing, a salary figure, an invoice with a client's address on it. Toolhose keeps all of it in the tab.

What we localise for United Kingdom, and what we don't pretend to

Plenty of calculators claim to be localised when all they've done is change the currency symbol. The numbers underneath stay generic, which makes the output confidently wrong. Our finance tools use United Kingdom rules — the actual rates, thresholds and reliefs, with every allowance, tax and contribution shown as its own line item rather than folded into a single mystery figure.

Each figure is sourced from the body that actually sets it — HMRC, Scottish Government, MHCLG, Revenue Scotland and Welsh Revenue Authority — and every finance page links out to the page it came from, so you can check us.

What we don't do is claim more precision than we have. These tools produce estimates. Regional taxes, deductions, and reliefs specific to your situation will move the number, and a calculator that says otherwise is selling you something. Every finance page carries that caveat where you'll actually see it.

How this site pays for itself

The tools are free and we'd like to keep them that way, so some pages carry advertising and some link to products we may earn a commission on. We've tried to be disciplined about it: ad slots reserve their exact dimensions before anything loads, so the page never jumps under your cursor, and no ad sits between a tool's inputs and its result where it could be mistaken for a control. If an ad ever looks like part of a tool, that's a bug — tell us and we'll fix it.