Small tools that never upload

MetaMarshal began as a single weekend project: a tool that reads the hidden metadata in a photo and strips it before you share. The feature people actually noticed wasn't the stripping — plenty of tools do that. It was the promise underneath it: your photo never leaves your device. No upload, nothing to trust, nothing to delete later. You could open your browser's Network tab and watch it be true.

That promise turns out not to be about photos at all. It's about small jobs — the quick, one-off tasks you hand to a random website a dozen times a week — and the quiet habit of pasting your data into someone else's server to get them done.

The principle, not the photo

Formatting a blob of JSON, decoding a token, converting a timestamp, generating a hash, playing a daily puzzle — none of these need a server. The browser on your desk is a capable computer; the work can happen right there, on the bytes you already have, and never travel anywhere. The only reason so many of these tools upload your data is that it was slightly easier to build them that way. It isn't necessary, and for anything sensitive it's the wrong default.

So we started applying the metadata app's one rule to more of those small jobs. Same engineering discipline — everything runs in the browser, even when that's harder — pointed at a wider set of tasks.

What's in the suite now

The privacy tools you know are still here: clean a photo, redact faces and codes, bulk-clean, scrub video and PDFs, scan a screenshot for leaks. Alongside them is a growing set of developer utilities — a JSON formatter, Base64 and URL encoders, a JWT decoder, hash and UUID generators, a timestamp converter, a word counter — each running fully on-device. And there's a new corner for daily games: a free five-letter word puzzle that works offline and teaches you a word every time you solve it, with more on the way. Everything is free, and nothing you paste or drop is uploaded.

Pin the ones you use

You don't need an account to use any of it. If you make one, you can pin the tools you reach for to your home dashboard so they're one tap away, and those pins follow you across devices. Sign out and they still work — the pins just live in your browser instead.

The same promise, a bigger surface

Adding tools didn't change the line. The consumer apps run on your device; the only server we operate is the developer API, which is a separate product with its own honest promise — process in memory, delete on a short TTL. For everything else, the check is the same one it always was: open DevTools, watch the Network tab, and confirm nothing leaves. Come see what's there at /apps.