About SK Play Labs
Two developers, a lot of small tools, and one place to keep them.
SK Play Labs is built by two people. We're software developers, we work together at the same company, and we build this in the evenings and on weekends — it started as a side project and it still is one.
It began the way most side projects do: with mild annoyance. Between us we were opening a different website for every small job — one for a quick EMI figure, another to format some JSON, a third to shrink an image before mailing it. Most of them worked. Some of them we genuinely liked. But a lot of the time we'd finish and think this would be better if it just did X, or if it stopped nagging us to sign up, or if it didn't take a full second to load a text box.
So we started building our own. The rule was simple, and it still is: when one of us needs a tool, we build it properly and put it here. That's how the catalogue grew to 78 tools — not from a content plan, but from actually needing each one.
The games came from the same place. We wanted something to play for five minutes when work got heavy, without installing an app or sitting through an ad to get a life back. So we wrote our own versions — 14 of them now — and they load instantly and start when you press start.
We used the site ourselves for months before it occurred to us that other people probably want the same things. So we finished the rough edges and made it public.
How we try to keep it trustworthy
A calculator that quietly returns the wrong number is worse than no calculator at all, so a few things aren't negotiable for us:
- The maths is tested, not trusted. Every calculation is written as plain logic separated from the interface, and covered by automated tests — more than 700 of themrun before anything reaches the site. A change that breaks a result doesn't get published.
- Your files never leave your device. Every tool runs in your browser. When you merge a PDF or compress a photo, nothing is uploaded — there's no server to upload it to. Close the tab and it's gone.
- Estimates are labelled as estimates. Anything touching money or health carries a note saying what it assumes and where it stops. Tax slabs and GST rates get re-checked when the rules change, and we date those changes.
- We only use software we're allowed to use. Every library we ship is permissively licensed or written by us. That's cost us features — we can't offer HEIC conversion or MP3 export, because the only browser libraries for either come with licence terms we won't accept. We'd rather be missing a feature than be sloppy about someone else's work.
Why you don't see our names
We publish under the studio name rather than our own, and we'd rather be upfront about that than let it look like an oversight. We're both fairly private people. Putting our faces on this would make us self-conscious about what we ship, and we'd rather the work be judged on whether it's useful.
What that doesn't mean is being unaccountable. We're a two-person team based in Bengaluru, India, this email reaches both of us, and we answer it. If a tool gives you a wrong answer, tell us — we genuinely want to know, and fixing it is usually the same evening.
How this is paid for
Everything here is free, and there's no account to make. Right now it isn't funded at all — we pay for the hosting ourselves, and there are no ads on the site.
We did try. We applied to Google's ad programme and were turned down, for a reason that had nothing to do with anything you can see here. We may try another route later. If ads ever do appear, they'll follow the rules we set before we had any: never between a tool's input and its result, never as a pop-up or a thing that chases you down the page, and never in a way that shifts the layout while you're reading.
We're not pretending it's charity — we'd like this to earn something for the hours that go into it eventually. But the tools came first and they stay first, funded or not.
One upside for you in the meantime: with no ad network involved, this site currently sets no cookies at all. The banner covers our analytics, which are cookieless anyway and stay genuinely optional. The Cookie Policy spells out exactly what is and isn't stored.
Tell us we got something wrong
Wrong result, confusing wording, a tool you wish existed — all of it is welcome. A fair number of things on this site exist because someone asked.