About Pikkit

What this site is

Pikkit is a collection of small, single-purpose tools that run entirely in your web browser: emoji and symbol pickers, text converters, calculators, image and PDF utilities, audio editors, developer converters and a shelf of games. Each one does one job, opens instantly, asks for no account and keeps whatever you put into it on your own device. Alongside the tools are long-form guides that explain the ideas behind them — how QR codes survive damage, why Easter moves, what a one-rep max actually measures — written for people rather than for search engines.

Why everything runs in your browser

Most online converters work by uploading your file to a server, processing it there and sending the result back. That model has two costs the user rarely sees: the file leaves their control, and the site has to pay for servers, which pushes it toward accounts, limits and upsells. Pikkit takes the other route. Every tool is JavaScript that executes on your machine, so a photo you crop, a PDF you sign or a recording you trim is processed in the page and discarded when you close the tab. There is no upload step because there is no server that could receive one — a claim you can verify yourself by loading any tool, disconnecting from the internet, and using it anyway.

The trade-off is honest limits. Some jobs need heavyweight processing that browsers only recently became able to do — optical character recognition, MP3 encoding, background removal with machine learning — and those tools load an open-source engine onto your device when you press their button, then work offline. Jobs a browser genuinely can't do (lossless MP4 editing, for one) are stated plainly on the relevant pages, which point to the right kind of tool instead.

How the tools are built and checked

Every tool is hand-written, and every one that computes something is checked against values worked out independently before it goes live: Easter dates against published tables, PDF booklet page orders against printer imposition rules, WAV file headers byte-for-byte against the format specification, unit conversions against reference figures. The site also verifies that every page renders without errors and fits a 320-pixel phone screen before each release. When a check fails, the tool is fixed before publishing — several of the tools on this site shipped a day late because a verification caught a mistake.

The pages themselves are static HTML. The descriptions, explanations and frequently-asked questions on every page are real text in the document, readable by anyone and anything, not loaded later by script.

The honesty rule

One editorial rule governs every page: say what the tool actually does, including what it can't. The speed changer explains that pitch moves with speed because that's the physics; the PDF compressor warns that its method turns text into images; the binaural beats generator says plainly that the brainwave-entrainment claims have weak evidence; the sharpener tells you it cannot recover detail a photo never captured. Tools that promise "AI enhancement" of things that can't be enhanced don't appear here. The aim is that a page's explanation is worth reading even if you never press the button.

How the site is paid for

Advertising, through Google AdSense, and nothing else: no premium tier, no accounts, no data resale, no affiliate links dressed as recommendations. The ad script and Google Analytics are the only third-party code on every page, and neither can see anything you type into a tool. A few tools — the background remover, background changer, face blur, image to text, PDF OCR, searchable PDF and the HEIC converter — also fetch their open-source engine from a public content-delivery network when you press their button: the engine is code, not your file, which never leaves your device. The privacy policy and terms describe exactly what each collects.

Editorial standards

The guides are held to a fixed set of rules, because a reference article is only useful if it can be trusted:

• Named author, real dates. Every guide carries the byline of Ritchie, who wrote it, with the date it was published and the date it was last checked.
• Sources on every article. Each guide ends with the references its claims rest on — primary sources where they exist (standards bodies, government agencies, the original research paper), stable reference works otherwise. Every reference is verified to be live before publishing.
• Checked against the tools. Where a guide explains a formula or an algorithm, the site's own tool implements it, and that tool is tested against independently computed values — so the article and the implementation cannot quietly disagree.
• Disclaimers where they matter. Guides touching health, money or law say plainly that they are general information and point to a professional. Nothing on this site is medical, financial or legal advice.
• Corrections are made, not buried. Errors reported through the contact page are fixed in the article itself, and the updated date changes. There is no comment section to reply in; the correction goes where the mistake was.
• Tools help write; a person is responsible. Drafting and research use software, including AI writing tools; every factual claim is then checked against the listed sources by the author, who is accountable for what is published. Nothing is published unread.

Who makes it

Pikkit is built and maintained by Ritchie, a single independent developer — not a company or a content farm. It started in 2026 as a personal replacement for the ad-choked converter sites that upload your files, and grew because each new tool was one somebody had asked for. Corrections, bug reports and suggestions are genuinely read — the contact page explains how to send them and what to expect back.