About 2RE Club

2RE Club is a growing collection of free tools that run in your browser, plus a couple of experiments and some writing.

Who runs this

2RE Club is built and maintained by one developer, Torrey Nommesen — the same name on the byline of every post in Writing. There is no company behind it, no support team and no content plan: the tools exist because I needed them and got tired of the alternatives.

That is why the tools are small and single-purpose. A word counter should count words, not ask you to create an account, install a browser extension or hand over your document.

How the tools are built

The site is a small Node/Express app serving plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript. There is no framework or CMS in the way: the markup is the site. The rules I hold to:

  • Client-side first. Counting words, encoding URLs, converting colours, previewing Markdown, checking spelling and drawing the shades gallery all happen in your browser — nothing is uploaded.
  • No accounts, no tracking, no third-party scripts of my own. No sign-up, no analytics package, and every asset is served from this domain rather than a CDN. There is a way to track pages without feeding the info to Google, so I might do that if the site gets more popular.
  • The server only appears when it must. Four things genuinely need it: fetching a page to read its Open Graph tags, fingerprinting a site's technology, loading a page into the editor, and running OCR. Each of those says so on its own page, with the privacy cost stated plainly.
  • Guardrails on anything that fetches. Server-side requests are limited to public hosts (no localhost, no private network ranges), redirects are re-checked at every hop, responses are capped at 2 MB and time out after 12 seconds. The page editor strips scripts and inline handlers before you ever see the copy.
  • A test suite. The counting logic, URL encoding, Open Graph parsing, technology detection, the editor's sanitiser, the blog build and the sitemap all have tests that run with npm test.

Why “web apps you should pay for”

The tagline is a joke with a point. Most of these tools have paid equivalents that are perfectly good — I just do not think you should have to subscribe to a spreadsheet of utilities in order to count a paragraph. So the free version exists, it does one job, and it stays out of your way.

How this is paid for

I did try to monetise it with ads. I applied to Google AdSense and got turned down because the site had “Low value content.” Fuck Google. The content is the tools, and the tools work.

So there is no ad network here. What is left is a few referral codes on the home page and at the foot of every tool page. Use whichever is useful to you and ignore the others: nothing here depends on them, there is no tracking of my own, no paywall and no upsell. Turn on an ad blocker and the deals go away and the site still works.

If you sell something and want to support the site with a non-bullshit ad — no tracking pixels, no pop-ups, no video that follows you down the page — send me a message and we will talk.

The experiments

Not everything here is a tool. The hairstyle gallery is a shortlist I put together for myself to show a barber, and 50 Shades of 2048 is a grey-themed fork where merging adds five instead of doubling. They are labelled as experiments wherever they appear, because they are not utilities — they are things I wanted to make.

Keeping it honest

Where a decision costs you something, the page says so. The Spell Check Pad ships no dictionary, so it leans on your browser's own spellchecker and tells you that. The OCR tool stores your upload on the server, and its page says that too, along with where the file goes and who can see it. The privacy page lists what every tool does with whatever you give it.

If something is wrong, broken or missing, send a message — bug reports and tool requests are the reason half of this exists.