About
Pantechnicon is a set of small developer tools that run entirely in your browser. One site, the whole toolbox, and nothing you paste is sent anywhere.
What it is for
Developers need the same handful of small jobs done constantly — compare two files, read a token, tidy some JSON, check a checksum. The tools that do those jobs are scattered across dozens of sites, most of them covered in adverts, several of them uploading whatever you paste to a server you know nothing about.
This is an attempt at the opposite: every one of those tools in one place, all of them free, none of them sending your data anywhere. The toolbox is listed in full on the homepage, including the twenty-two that are not built yet.
Who runs it
One developer, working alone, in the United Kingdom. There is no company behind this, no team and no investor. That is worth stating plainly rather than hiding behind a plural "we" — it sets a fair expectation about how quickly things get built and fixed.
The work is not anonymous by accident. If something here is wrong, there is a real address at the bottom of this page and a person who reads it.
Why it is free, and how it will pay for itself
The free tools cost almost nothing to run. They are static files, and the work happens on your machine rather than on a server. There is no per-use cost, which is why there is no usage limit and no account.
Money will come later, from a separate set of tools that genuinely need a server — a request bin, mock API endpoints, a mock SMTP inbox. Those will be paid, they will need an account, and they will be kept visibly apart from the free ones. The free tools will not be metered afterwards. The homepage sets that out in full, including what has and has not been priced.
There are no adverts and there will not be any. An ad network means third-party scripts, and third-party scripts would make the privacy claim untrue. The two positions cannot both be held, so this one was chosen.
How it is built
Static HTML, CSS and vanilla JavaScript. No framework, no build step, no dependencies — the diff engine, for instance, is a hand-written longest-common-subsequence implementation rather than a library. Fonts are served from this domain rather than a font CDN.
That is not minimalism for its own sake. Every external thing a page loads is something that could log a request, and the claim on the front of this site is that nothing does. The privacy page sets out exactly what is and is not stored, and gives four ways to check it yourself rather than take it on trust.
Getting in touch
Corrections, bug reports and requests for a tool that is not on the list are all welcome, at hello@pantechnicon.dev.
The most useful message you can send is one that says a claim on this site does not hold up. The whole thing is written specifically enough to be checked, which means it is written specifically enough to be wrong.