Why 4tools Store Is the Only Free Toolbox I Still Have Bookmarked in 2025

I’ve been doing SEO, content, and web dev since the days when Google still loved exact-match domains and people actually used Altavista. Over the years I’ve paid for Ahrefs, SEMrush, Canva Pro, Midjourney credits, Photoshop licenses… you name it. Most of those subscriptions are gone now. But there’s one tab that has survived every browser cleanup, every laptop change, every “I’m going minimalist” phase: 4tools.store.

Yeah, the name is a little on-the-nose. Yeah, the design looks like it was built in 2018 and never touched again. And yeah, it’s completely free and doesn’t even ask for your email. That combination shouldn’t exist anymore, but somehow it does—and it’s legitimately useful almost every single day.

Let me show you why I still swear by it.

SEO Tools That Actually Get Used (Instead of Just Sitting in a Paid Dashboard)

Every SEO suite wants to sell you “keyword gap analysis” and “rank tracking for 10,000 keywords.” Cool. I need to know if a blog post has too much keyword stuffing before my editor sees it.

4tools has a Keyword Density Checker that loads in half a second, lets me paste 2,000 words, and instantly shows the exact percentage for single words and two/three-word phrases. No login, no limit, no “upgrade to pro for more than 500 words” nonsense.

Last month I was cleaning up a client’s 2019 blog post that ranked #6 for “best wireless earbuds under $100.” The page was 4,200 words and the phrase appeared 41 times—roughly 1% density. Google had been slowly pushing it down for six months. I dropped the text into 4tools, saw the problem in ten seconds, cut it down to 26 mentions (0.62%), rewrote a few paragraphs, and two weeks later the page jumped to #3. That one tool paid for… well, it’s free, but you get what I mean.

They also have:

Meta Tag Generator – I use this every time I launch a new Shopify store. Takes 30 seconds, outputs perfect title/description/OG tags.

Robots.txt Generator – Saved me when I fat-fingered a Disallow: / last year and accidentally blocked the entire site for three days.

Backlink Checker (basic but surprisingly accurate for quick health checks)

Domain Age Checker – handy when I’m vetting potential PBN domains or just being nosy about competitors.

Nothing here is going to replace your enterprise suite, but for 80% of day-to-day SEO firefighting, it’s perfect.

Image Tools That Save Me From Opening Photoshop 90% of the Time

I’m not proud of this, but I still pay for Photoshop because muscle memory dies hard. Yet nine times out of ten I end up using 4tools instead.

Their image resizer/compressor is stupidly good. Drag and drop, choose quality, download. Last week I had 47 product photos at 2400px wide that were murdering my Largest Contentful Paint score. Dropped them all in, set to 1600px + 75% quality, and the entire folder went from 184 MB to 21 MB. Core Web Vitals went from red to green overnight.

Other winners:

Watermark adder – batch mode actually works (looking at you, every other “free” tool that limits to 3 images)

Format converter – WEBP ↔ JPG ↔ PNG in one click

Image metadata stripper – crucial before uploading client photos that still have GPS coordinates in them

Favicons generator – I use this literally every time I spin up a new landing page

Real story: A friend was launching a print-on-demand store and Teespring rejected every single design because the PNGs had embedded color profiles that messed up printing. Ten minutes on 4tools stripping metadata and re-exporting as sRGB PNGs and he was live. Saved his entire launch day.

Text & Content Tools I Abuse Daily

The text section is where 4tools really flexes.

Case converter – I write in Google Docs with caps lock permanently broken, apparently.

Word counter / character counter – faster than Word’s built-in one and doesn’t require opening a file.

Lorem Ipsum generator – but with actual useful placeholder text options (including JSON, SQL, and even fake credit card numbers for testing).

Text diff checker – caught a developer who “didn’t change anything” on a pricing page that suddenly dropped conversions 30%.

Password generator – strong enough that I actually trust it for client logins I need to share once and forget.

The JSON formatter/validator is criminally underrated. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve pasted some mangled API response in there, clicked “Beautify,” and instantly spotted the missing comma that was breaking everything.

Web Utilities That Just Work

The QR code generator is the best on the internet—full customization, dynamic QR codes, no logo slapped in the middle unless you want it, and you can download SVG. I use it for everything from Wi-Fi login cards in Airbnbs to conference talk handouts.

Other gems:

Base64 encoder/decoder – for when you need to embed an image in CSS and don’t want to open DevTools

URL encoder/decoder – still faster than any browser extension I’ve tried

HTML minifier – drops most landing page payloads by another 15-20% when combined with WP Rocket or Cloudflare

Color palette generator from image – legitimately helpful for pulling brand colors from client logos

The Catch? There Isn’t One (That Matters)

Look, the site looks like it was designed by someone who really loves Bootstrap 4 and tables. There are no dark mode, no accounts, no history, no fancy animations. Sometimes an ad for a VPN pops up (which is how they stay free, I assume). That’s it.

In 2025, when every tool wants a subscription, your data, or both, 4tools just… works. No enshittification yet. No sudden paywall. No “new and improved” redesign that hides the one feature you actually used.

I’m not saying you should cancel Ahrefs or Photoshop tomorrow. But if you’re a freelancer, indie hacker, small agency owner, or just someone who hates paying for things you use twice a month, bookmark 4tools.store right now.

I’ve been using it for four years straight. It’s never let me down once.

And honestly? In a web that gets worse every year, that feels like a minor miracle.