How we built ToolField - the tech behind global, private, instant tools
A look under the hood of ToolField: a DB-driven content model, provider-agnostic factories, MSSQL, ephemeral queue workers and edge delivery across 25 languages - and why that lets us ship globally without the bloat.
Most online tools bury a 30-second task under ads, pop-ups and upsells. We wanted the opposite: one clean field where every tool is one click away, runs in milliseconds, and respects your privacy by default. Here is how the stack fits together.
Everything is driven by the database
Pages, navigation, SEO, the tool catalog and even this article are content rows, not code. One generic renderer turns typed content blocks into the page you are reading, so we can add a tool or publish a guide by editing data - no redeploy. The same content flows, localized, to all 25 languages.
A blog post body, for example, is a structured document - each heading is data, not markup:
{
"_type": "block",
"style": "h2",
"children": [{ "_type": "span", "text": "A real heading" }]
}Provider-agnostic by default
Every external dependency - storage, the work queue, email, payments, geolocation, secrets - sits behind a factory and a provider map. Swapping a vendor is adding a class, not a rewrite. It keeps us portable and outages survivable.
Privacy is the architecture, not a checkbox
Tools are components - so we can drop one into an article
Here is the real Merge PDF tool, running inline - no new tab, no upload to anyone else:
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Built for the whole world
25 languages with right-to-left support, WCAG 2.1 AA baked into shared components, edge caching, and structured data so search engines and AI assistants can cite us accurately. That is how a small team ships globally without the bloat.