Two developers built 126 client-side browser tools and share hard lessons learned

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Two independent developers built Pageonaut, a collection of 126 free browser-based tools including converters, calculators, and PDF utilities, all designed to run entirely client-side without any file uploads or server processing. The privacy-first approach kept hosting costs low but introduced complex engineering challenges around PDF handling and UI performance. A major outage occurred twice when bots exploited shareable challenge URLs with infinite parameter combinations, causing Next.js ISR cache to balloon to 419 GB and crash their server disk. The team resolved the issue by disabling ISR on routes with unbounded URL spaces and adding early parameter validation. Additional lessons included building on GitHub Actions due to RAM constraints on their cheap European host, and discovering their site had been displaying Vercel's default favicon in Google search results for an extended period.

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