About Benchvale
Benchvale is a set of small utilities that run in your browser, built and maintained by one person. It exists because most free tools of this kind either upload what you paste to a server you know nothing about, or work fine until they ask you to make an account to keep your own data.
Who maintains this
Every tool on this site is built and maintained by Aaron Wilson, who is also the person who answers when you use the contact page.
That is a deliberate choice over an anonymous brand voice. If a calculator gives you a wrong number, there should be somebody whose name is on it. The same byline appears at the bottom of every tool page, with the date it was published and the date it was last materially changed.
Benchvale is run by Benchvale LLC, an Ohio limited liability company.
Why this exists
There is a whole category of tool that has no business needing a server: contrast ratios, unit conversions, date arithmetic, text counting, formatting JSON. The math is small and every browser can do it. Yet most of the free versions online send your input somewhere, and very few of them explain what happens to it.
That is worth fixing for the obvious privacy reason, and for a less obvious one: a tool that does not need a server is faster, keeps working once it has loaded, and cannot break because someone else's API changed. The constraint makes the product better, not only safer.
The second thing is the account wall. A surprising number of these tools work perfectly until you want to keep a list, at which point you are asked to register. Browsers have had local storage for fifteen years. Where a tool here has something worth keeping, it keeps it on your device, tells you exactly what it kept, and gives you one button to clear it.
How it is built
Static pages with a small amount of JavaScript that runs only the interactive part. The claim that nothing you type leaves your browser is enforced by an automated test that fails the build if a tool page makes an unexpected network request. The expected ones are the analytics requests to the hosts listed on the privacy page and the one you send by pressing Helpful, and none of them carries anything you type. The mechanism is described in full on how we build tools.
How it makes money
Advertising, once there is enough here to be worth advertising against. There are no ads today. When there are, they go below the tool, never above it, never in classroom projection mode, and always in a fixed reserved space so nothing on the page moves.
There is no paid tier, no premium version, and no plan for one. If that changes it will be written here first.
What is coming
Seven groups of tools are live: color, developer, marketing, school, date and time, home projects, and homeschool. More groups are planned, including writing, kitchen, unit conversion, number, file, money and fitness tools. The changelog records each one when it goes live.
Last updated . The changelog lists what changed across the site, and when.