How I Built a Platform With 100+ Free Tools and APIs as a Solo Developer
Every indie hacker knows the pain. You're building your product, and suddenly you need a QR code generator. Then a subtitle tool. Then an invoice API. Each time, you either write it from scratch or sign up for yet another SaaS with its own pricing, dashboard, and billing.
I got tired of that cycle. So I built a unified platform that bundles 100+ free online tools, standalone apps, and developer APIs under one roof. One account, one credit balance, every tool you need.
The Problem That Started Everything
As a developer working on multiple projects simultaneously, I was constantly running into the same frustration. One week I needed to generate invoices for a client project. The next week I needed a way to add watermarks to images before sending them out. Then I needed to shorten some URLs, validate a list of emails, translate content into five languages, and pull YouTube analytics for a marketing report.
The options were always the same — use a bloated SaaS tool with a $29/month subscription for a feature I'd use twice a month, or spend hours building my own solution from scratch. Neither option made sense. I was paying for six different tools, each with its own login, its own billing cycle, and its own learning curve. Most of them I used so rarely that I'd forget my password between sessions.
So I asked myself: what if there was one platform that handled all of these small but essential tasks? Not a jack-of-all-trades that does everything poorly, but a curated collection of focused tools that each do one thing really well — and all accessible from the same place, with the same account, and the same simple pricing.
What It Actually Does
The platform works on two levels, serving both people who prefer clicking buttons and developers who prefer writing code.
For everyday users, there are full-featured web applications, each focused on a specific task. A caption generator lets you upload a video and get professionally styled subtitles in over 20 languages — no video editing skills required. A watermarking tool handles adding or removing watermarks from images, videos, PDFs, and even 3D files, with batch processing for when you have hundreds of files to protect. The translation tool goes beyond simple word-for-word conversion — it offers rephrasing, grammar correction, summarization, and synonym lookup with deep contextual awareness so the output actually sounds natural. A currency converter shows real-time rates and, more importantly, compares the actual fees you'd pay across platforms like Wise, Revolut, PayPal, and Western Union, so you always know which service gives you the best deal. A screenshot tool captures full-page website images on demand or on a schedule, and can even generate visual diffs to show what changed between captures. A link management dashboard unifies QR codes and short links with built-in click analytics.
For developers, every single tool is also available as a clean REST API. The interface is dead simple — one POST request with your API key, and you get structured JSON back. Over 30 API modules cover everything from YouTube data extraction and text processing to geolocation, bot detection, email validation, domain analysis, invoicing, and more. If you can use it in the browser, you can automate it with code.
Why Credits Beat Subscriptions
One of the most important decisions I made early on was choosing a credit-based pricing model instead of monthly subscriptions. The reason is simple: utility tools have unpredictable usage patterns. You might watermark 500 images this week and zero next month. You might need to validate 10,000 emails for a launch campaign and then not touch the tool again for three months.
With subscriptions, you're either overpaying during quiet months or hitting limits during busy ones. With credits, you pay exactly for what you use. Most operations cost a fraction of a cent — a single translation is about $0.02, a screenshot capture is even less. Users start with free credits to explore, and when they need more, packages range from $10 to $500 with volume discounts up to 40%.
This model resonates especially well with indie hackers and small teams who are careful about recurring costs. There's no monthly bill ticking away while you sleep. Your credits sit there until you need them.
What I Learned Building This
The biggest lesson was to build the API first, always. Every feature I created started as an API endpoint before I ever thought about the user interface. The web apps are simply frontends that call the same APIs any developer can use. This approach has a compounding benefit — every new tool is automatically available to both casual users and developers from day one, and I never maintain two separate systems for the same functionality.
I also learned that bundling matters more than individual feature depth. Most people don't need the world's most advanced watermarking tool. They need a watermarking tool that works, right now, without a 30-minute onboarding flow — and they want it in the same place as their QR code generator and their invoice builder. Convenience and simplicity win over feature bloat every time.
Another unexpected insight: the tools sell each other. Someone signs up to use the caption generator for their YouTube videos, discovers the translation tool while browsing, and suddenly they're using five different features from the platform. The unified account and shared credit balance remove all friction from trying something new.
What's Next
The platform keeps growing. I'm currently building out a chatbot creator, an uptime monitoring service, and more advanced analytics across the board. The long-term vision is for yeb.to to be the default toolkit for indie hackers and small teams — the one place you go before you even think about searching for a separate SaaS tool.
If you're building a product and tired of juggling a dozen different services for basic utilities, give it a look. Everything starts free, and you can explore the full catalog without even creating an account.
