y2meta is a free set of checkers and spec references for YouTube creators, covering thumbnails, channel banners, Shorts and titles. The name is shared with a crowd of YouTube downloader sites, and this one says plainly that it never downloads or converts videos, and links each number it quotes back to YouTube Help.
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Tools & utilities sites that earned a spot
Single-purpose web tools — calculators, converters, generators — useful before beautiful, sometimes both.
12 sites · every one earned it
Sound Education turns words, minutes and audio settings into each other for podcasters, narrators, video scriptwriters and teachers. Every result prints the formula behind it, and gear specs come straight from manufacturers' sheets with a checked date — no reviews, no rankings, no blog.
Blobs makes the soft, irregular shapes designers drop behind headlines, photos and slide dividers, exporting each as an editable vector path rather than an image. Each shape's seed, node count and fill ride in the query string, so a blob is a link: paste the URL and the exact path rebuilds.
FishingHelps gives a daily bite forecast for any of 16,000+ US towns, folding solunar feeding windows and live weather into a single score. Its own about page calls solunar theory a folk model with mixed scientific support, which is rare candor from a site built on it.
BirdBench makes small, free tools for North American birders, from hummingbird nectar ratios to nest box dimensions. One of them ranks eBird hotspots by species count times months since anyone filed a checklist, surfacing the good patch everyone drives past.
TextDet boxes every line of text in a photo, scan or screenshot, running the detector models in the browser rather than on a server. Its table of ten years of detectors deliberately refuses to rank them — the papers test on different datasets, so it reads as a timeline, not a leaderboard.
TubeToolbelt is a set of eighteen free browser tools for YouTube creators — grabbing a thumbnail, scoring a title, pulling a transcript, pricing a sponsorship. There is no account, no watermark and no paywalled export button, and no advertising or third-party tracking making up the difference.
ExpiredFeed publishes daily lists of deleted, pending-delete and newly registered domains, aimed at domain investors, SEOs and developers. When the daily import stalls, a red banner on the homepage says so rather than quietly serving a stale list as today's.
CutMath is a free set of woodworking calculators for the math before a cut: cutting layouts, board feet, wood movement, stair stringers. Every movement and hardness figure for its 100 species is taken from the USDA Forest Products Laboratory's Wood Handbook, which is public domain.
TallyChef is a set of free calculators for the numbers a restaurant runs on — plate cost, menu price, prime cost, tip splits — built for independent operators. Its argument is that formulas taught in any hospitality course shouldn't sit behind a subscription — no account, no export paywall.
PoolDates works out when to open and close a backyard pool in a given US town, and how to dose the water in between. Each date comes from 1991–2020 NOAA normals at the nearest weather station, which it names, and arrives as a window rather than one confident day.
CanningDates turns a US ZIP code into the altitude adjustments a tested canning recipe assumes the cook already knows — minutes for a water bath, pounds for a pressure canner. It refuses to extrapolate: past the last row of the USDA table it says so and points to a county extension office.