Support ZeroUtil

ZeroUtil is free forever - no accounts, no paywalls, and almost everything runs right in your browser. If a tool just saved you time, a small donation helps keep it that way.

Why donations matter

• Free forever. Every tool is fully usable by the first visitor and the millionth - no premium tier, no locked features.
• No tracking, no accounts. Client-side tools never send your files anywhere; we do not sell data or build profiles.
• Real server costs. The heavy media tools (video to GIF, trimmer, converter) run FFmpeg on EU servers. Uploads auto-delete within 15 minutes - and that infrastructure costs money every month.

What it actually costs to run

ZeroUtil is not a company with an office. It is a catalog of more than 200 tools in two languages, and the running costs are small but real and monthly:

• Static hosting and CDN. Every tool page, article and asset is served from a global edge network. This part scales cheaply, which is exactly why the browser-only tools can stay free no matter how many people use them.
• One media server. Video and audio tools cannot run in your browser without headers that would break the rest of the site, so they run FFmpeg on a rented EU machine with a job queue in front of it. That box is billed monthly whether one person or a thousand use it, and it is the single largest line item.
• Upload and download bandwidth. Media jobs move real files in and out. Processed files are deleted automatically 15 minutes after they are ready, so nothing accumulates - but the transfer is paid for either way.
• Domain, certificates and email. Unglamorous, unavoidable, renewed every year.

What donations pay for, in order

Donations do not go into a general pot. They are spent on keeping what exists online, and only then on adding to it:

1. 1 Keeping the media server running. If donations and ads ever stopped covering it, the video and audio tools would be the first thing to go - so they are the first thing funded.
2. 2 Keeping the tools ad-light. Ads pay most of the bills. The more donations cover, the less pressure there is to add another ad slot to a page you came to for a 10-second job.
3. 3 Maintenance nobody sees. Standards move, browser APIs break, tax tables and character limits change. Re-checking published pages is unpaid work that nothing else funds.
4. 4 New tools and translations. What is left goes to building the next tool and translating the existing ones.

Free ways to help, if you would rather not pay

Money is genuinely optional. These help about as much:

• Link to a tool that solved your problem - from a forum answer, a README, a blog post, a wiki. A link from a page a human actually reads is worth more to a site this size than most donations.
• Allowlist the site in your ad blocker. Ads here are text and display, never interstitials or autoplay video, and they fund the servers directly.
• Tell us when something is wrong. A calculator that disagrees with your own maths, an article that has gone stale, a tool that breaks on your browser - all of it is worth more than a polite silence.

Before you donate

Do I get anything for donating?

No, and that is deliberate. There is no premium tier, no ad-free login, no unlocked features. Everything is already available to everyone, and putting features behind donations would break the one promise the site makes.

Is it one-off or recurring?

One-off by default. Stripe handles the payment and the card details; nothing about your payment is stored on or seen by zeroutil.com.

Is this tax deductible?

No. ZeroUtil is not a registered charity, and a donation is a gift toward hosting costs rather than a deductible contribution. Please do not treat it as one.

What if I change my mind?

Get in touch and we will refund it, no explanation needed.

Thank you - every contribution, large or small, directly keeps the tools online.