Why Utility Apps
Have To Be Ugly

Toolbit started as a question nobody was asking, and the answer turned out to be that they do not.

The question

Everything needed to work out a percentage or run a ladder draw was built long ago. Yet the tools you actually land on when you search are uniformly crude, and none of them look related to each other. Past three ad walls and a cookie banner, the screen that finally appears is the same one it was fifteen years ago.

A simple function is not a licence to be ugly. If anything it is the opposite — when a product does exactly one thing, how it presents that one thing is the entire product. The calculation takes a millisecond. Everything the user experiences is the part around it.

A language, before the tools

So the first thing built was not a tool. It was a system: twelve colours rather than an open palette, one of them assigned to each tool. One flat character per tool, all drawn to the same rule. Type scale, line weights, corner radii and motion durations are fixed, written down and published.

The point of that discipline is not tidiness. It is that the twentieth tool wears the same face as the first, so anyone who has used one has already learned the next. You can read the whole thing in the design system.

Tools you remember

Easy to use and easy to remember are separate problems, and utilities usually solve neither. They get used once and forgotten, because there was nothing there to remember.

Every tool here has its own colour and its own face. The green one with the horses. The yellow one for exchange rates. When you need it again, the aim is that the face comes back before the name does.

How they work

• Everything runs in your browser. Numbers, names, images and text are never uploaded.
• Every tool is free to use without an account. One is only needed to keep a tool box and a history — and, later, for anything paid.
• No install. Every tool is a page that opens in under a second.
• Korean and English, switchable at any time from the header.

The one exception is the currency converter, which fetches reference rates from the European Central Bank. It sends no information about you, and it falls back to a stored table when the network is unavailable.

Ads stay out of the way

Ads sit in fixed slots that do not cover a tool or interrupt a result — no interstitials, no pop-ups, no countdown before an answer. Nothing gets between you and the tool.

Suggest a tool

If something you use often is missing, say so — there is a form on the front page. The list is chosen from what people actually search for. There is a long way to go.