Zeropng.com shipped 19 tools and never wrote a single API endpoint

No server, no database, no accounts, no job queue. Every tool runs inside the tab.

The reasoning was less noble than it sounds. We were building an image compressor and got to the part where you design the upload pipeline: presigned URLs, a worker to do the encoding, a bucket, a retention policy, and a paragraph in a privacy policy explaining how long we keep your files. Every one of those was a thing that could leak or cost money.

So we deleted it. libjpeg-turbo, libpng, libavif, and the AVIF and JPEG XL encoders all compile to WebAssembly. The browser can do the work. It is the user's CPU, the user's memory, and the user's file, and it never becomes our problem.

What that bought us:

Hosting is a static bundle on a CDN, so marginal cost per user rounds to nothing and the tools can just be free. Not freemium. Free.
There is no breach to have, because there is nothing to breach.
It works offline. Install it as a PWA, and it keeps compressing on a plane.
The privacy claim is verifiable by anyone. Open DevTools, watch the network tab, drop a file, see nothing happen.

What it cost us:

First load is heavy. WASM codecs are not small and the AI models are far worse. Background removal has to pull a real ONNX model down before it can do anything, and there is no way to hide that.
Mobile Safari memory limits are a hard ceiling. A 60 megapixel image does not run slowly, it kills the tab.
No server means no shareable result links, no history, no cross-device anything. People ask, and the answer is always no.
Every bug is now a client-side bug on a device you cannot reproduce, reported by someone who cannot tell you their GPU.

I would make the same call again. I would not pretend the tradeoffs are free.

Has anyone else pushed genuinely heavy work into the client and regretted it? I am curious where other people drew the line.

Try zeropng.com now