Not everything has to be a product. Sometimes you build a thing because you needed it once, or because the data was sitting right there and nobody had plotted it on a map yet.
Here are three small tools I built and host. All of them are free, none of them ask you to sign up, and none of them want your email address.
🔄 Circular Chart Generator
You know the diagram. A ring of arrows chasing each other in a circle, a label on each segment, a title in the middle — the one that shows up in every “our process” slide ever made. Everyone has rebuilt it by hand in PowerPoint at least once, and it’s always slightly wrong.
This builds it for you. Set your steps, pick a palette, choose icons and fonts, flip the direction, and download the result as a PNG or JPEG.
A couple of things I’m quietly pleased with:
- The preview and the download are the same drawing. The code that builds the SVG runs in your browser for the live preview and on the server for the final render — one function, both places. So what lands in your downloads folder is pixel-identical to what you were just looking at, rather than “close enough.”
- Click a segment in the chart and it opens that step in the editor. The chart isn’t just output, it’s navigation.
- Nothing you type is kept. The render endpoint is completely stateless — no database, no file storage, no logging of your chart’s contents, and the response is explicitly marked never-cache. Editor state lives in your browser tab and resets when you reload. There’s deliberately no share link, because a public tool with free text fields shouldn’t be handing out durable URLs for whatever people paste into it.
🥶 Cold Locator
An interactive map of everywhere that’s colder than you are, right now.
It takes your location, checks your current temperature, and then shows you only cities that are colder — colour-coded by how much colder. Nothing warmer ever appears on the map, which makes it a surprisingly effective “get me out of here” device during a heatwave.
- ~145,000 cities in the dataset (GeoNames, everywhere with a population over 1,000), with live weather from Open-Meteo.
- Now mode and 7-day mode. The second compares against forecast highs rather than the current reading.
- Severe weather is flagged, and for US locations it cross-references active National Weather Service alert zones — cities inside one get a pulsing warning badge.
- Optional NASA satellite imagery layer if you’d rather look at the actual planet than a vector map.
The bit I like: if there’s genuinely nothing colder in your current view, it doesn’t just shrug and show you an empty map. It quietly searches progressively deeper tiers of the dataset — smaller and smaller towns — until it finds you something, all without moving or zooming your map out from under you.
💸 Cheaper Locator
Same idea, different axis: cities that are cheaper than where you are.
Each city gets a composite cost-of-living index where 100 is the global median, built from five independently-normalised categories:
| Weight | Category |
|---|---|
| 30% | Food & dining |
| 25% | Housing / rent |
| 15% | Transport |
| 15% | Utilities |
| 15% | Groceries |
That sits on the Kaggle Global Cost of Living dataset (~4,900 cities, 55 individual metrics) as the primary source, with The Economist’s Big Mac Index blended in at 10% as a country-level purchasing-power adjustment, and Inside Airbnb housing data weighted in at 40% for the major cities where both you and your destination have coverage.
One deliberate decision worth calling out: it only ever shows percentages, never dollar amounts. You’ll see “34% cheaper”, not “$1,240 a month”. This is to be expected as this kind of aggregate data simply doesn’t have sufficient precision or constant updates.
There’s also an optional overlay of roughly 39,000 McDonald’s branches worldwide, which is always nice for road-trips planning.
🔌 One more thing
Both maps are embeddable. Add a few URL parameters and you can drop either one into an iframe on your own page, pre-set to a specific city:
https://colder.itiszack.com/?city=London&unit=C&embed=1
https://cheaper.itiszack.com/?city=Tel%20Aviv&embed=trueUseful if you’re writing something about weather, relocation, or cost of living and want a live map rather than a screenshot.
Feel free to contact me if you find them useful, find a bug, or have an idea for what to map next.
Cheers,