I Built 250 Free Web Apps. These Are the 3 I Actually Use.

I built 250 disposable tools to find the 3 worth keeping.

Last week I sat down to count them. I knew the number was high, but I’d never actually added it up. Two hundred and fifty. That’s how many small web apps I’ve built and put online at southforkapps.com, free and no login required. A BMI calculator. A cron expression builder. A guitar fretboard. A thing that turns text into Pig Latin. Two hundred and fifty of them.

Here’s the part nobody tells you about building a lot of small tools: you don’t use most of them. I built a resistor color code reader one night because I was curious whether I could. I have never once needed it since. I wouldn’t could that as a failure as it’s the whole point, and I wrote about why in Disposable Software. Most of these were built to scratch one itch on one afternoon and then left alone.

But three of them stuck. Three I actually open on purpose, more than once, because they solve a problem I keep having. Those three are worth talking about, because they tell you which tools are worth building in the first place.

1. Recipe Scaler

I cook for six people. Four kids, my wife, me. Almost every recipe online is written for four servings, sometimes two, and the math to scale it up is the kind of thing I will get wrong while standing at the counter with raw chicken on my hands.

So I built Recipe Scaler. You paste in the ingredient list, tell it you want 1.5x or double or two-thirds, and it rewrites the quantities. That’s it. No account, no saving, no “premium tier for unlimited recipes.” I open it on my phone while the pan is heating up.

It survives because it removes a specific friction at a specific moment. The recurring annoyance (bad mental math under time pressure) meets a tool that’s faster to open than it is to do the arithmetic.

2. Teleprompter

Part of my job is making videos. When you’re reading a script to camera, the choice is usually between memorizing it (slow, and I’ll fumble it anyway) or glancing off to a sheet of paper (which looks exactly like what it is). Professional teleprompter software is either expensive or bloated with features I don’t need.

So I built a Teleprompter that does one thing: scrolls text at a speed I set, full screen, big enough to read from a few feet back. I paste the script, set the pace, and record. It runs in a browser tab on whatever machine is closest.

I use this one at work, which is the real test. A tool you only use in your own free time is a hobby. A tool you reach for when the clock is running and someone’s waiting on the footage is actually useful.

3. Pomodoro Timer

I’m forgetful and I’m easily pulled off course. Left alone, I’ll start writing a newsletter, remember I need to send an invoice, open a browser tab to do it, see an email, and forty minutes later I’m somewhere I didn’t mean to be.

The Pomodoro Timer is the dumbest of the three and the one I lean on most. Twenty-five minutes on, five off. The only thing it does that the timer on my phone doesn’t is sit in a tab and not tempt me to pick up the phone, which is where the trouble starts. I run it during writing blocks and during the boring stretches of my second job, where having a clock counting down keeps me moving instead of drifting.

It’s not sophisticated. It doesn’t track my focus history or sync to a dashboard. I don’t want it to. The moment a focus timer needs me to focus on it, it has failed.

What the three have in common

I didn’t pick these on purpose. They earned their place by being the ones I kept coming back to. Looking at them together, the pattern is obvious:

• They solve a problem I have on a schedule, not once. Cooking, recording, focusing. Things that recur.

• They open faster than the problem takes to solve manually. Zero friction. No login, no setup.

• They do one thing. None of them try to be a platform. The recipe scaler will never have a social feed.

That’s the lesson hiding in 247 tools I don’t use. Building software got cheap enough that I can make a thing in an afternoon to solve a single annoyance, and most of the time that’s all it ever needs to do. The 247 weren’t wasted. They were the cost of finding the 3.

If you’ve got a recurring annoyance and a free afternoon, build the dumb little tool. Worst case, it joins the pile. Best case, it’s one of your three.

All 250 are free at southforkapps.com. Go steal the ones that solve a problem you actually have or use what I have already built for free.