About LabAnvil
LabAnvil makes fast, focused web tools that do one job properly: no installs, no clutter, no sign-up walls.
What's here
- Tools: PDF tools and image tools, developer tools, currency and unit converters, date and craft calculators, and a product recall search across 11 government agencies.
- Guides: step-by-step walkthroughs for the jobs people bring to those tools, from making a PDF small enough to email to counting business days.
- Games: quick games built for a five-minute break. No energy meters, no nagging.
How the tools work
Most of our tools run entirely in your browser. The PDF, image and developer tools read, change and save your files on your own device; every library they use is served from LabAnvil itself, so nothing is uploaded and they keep working offline once a page has loaded. The calculators and converters work the same way.
A few tools need a server by nature, and we say so on their pages. The currency converter fetches live rates and names its source and update time under every result. Product Recalls collects notices from the agencies' own APIs and feeds, and every recall links to the official notice.
Where our numbers come from
- Units use exact definitions wherever one exists: an inch is exactly 2.54 cm and a pound exactly 0.45359237 kg.
- Exchange rates are mid-market rates from Open Exchange Rates or ExchangeRate-API, checked against the European Central Bank's daily reference rates.
- Holidays in the date calculators follow the published rules for US federal holidays and every Canadian province and territory, including when a weekend holiday is observed. Employers can add days of their own, so treat them as planning estimates.
- Recalls come from the CPSC, FDA and NHTSA, Health Canada, the CFIA and Transport Canada, the UK's OPSS and FSA, the EU's Safety Gate, Australia's ACCC and FSANZ, and the OECD. The short plain-English summary at the top of a recall is written by an AI model from that notice's own details; the details below it are taken from the notice itself.
How we write guides
Every guide is built around a real task and a worked example, and we work each example through the tool itself, so what you read matches what the tool gives you. Guides show when they were published and last updated, and we revise them when a tool changes.
What we hold ourselves to
- Pages load fast and work just as well on a phone.
- No account needed for any tool. Sign in only if you want favourites and recently viewed to follow you across devices.
- Your data stays yours. Wherever possible, files and what you type are processed in your browser and never reach our servers. The privacy policy has the details.
- LabAnvil is free and paid for by advertising. Ads never get in the way of the tool you came to use.
How we ship
New tools are marked New or in early access when they launch, and tell you plainly what they don't do yet. We'd rather cut a tool than ship a mediocre one, and tool pages list their notable updates.
Get in touch
Found a bug, a wrong number or an out-of-date guide, or need a tool we don't have yet? Tell us. Every message is read by a person, and corrections are made as soon as we've checked them.