About OpenKit
OpenKit is a registry, search engine, and launcher for small, browser-based web apps. It hosts small tools that all fulfill a single task of which many occur throughout our (work) days. It is a place for all those tools that we need to access quickly and fast but which are often hidden on the third page of Google's search results.
Imagine you are hosting a house warming party. As the first guest enters, they directly ask for your WiFi credentials. You think: "Wouldn't it be great to quickly throw together a QR code with the WiFi credentials and quickly print it out?"" Such a small QR code creator would be one of the tools we usually need, but rarely have at hand.
Or imagine you are coming out of a meeting where your team has finalized a small series of events to promote, say, some new campaign, and you're thinking that it would be great to quickly create a small file to send out over your newsletter to invite people to the events. Wouldn't it be great if you had a tool that solved exactly this problem without being a large, bulky desktop software?
These are everyday situations that have lead to the creation of OpenKit. OpenKit offers you a single website where you will find all of these tools. It is a growing community-effort to spotlight those helpful things on the web in a way that matters for those who have little time to decide and simply need to get something done.
Motivation
OpenKit started as an initiative to counter the growing Enshittification of the internet. In a time where more and more people are incentivized to extract small amounts of money for essentially anything online, it becomes harder and harder to find these small tools on the internet.
Specifically, while the idea was always around, one peculiar experience has finally pushed us to make this a reality. At some point, we needed to create a few QR codes to add to some slides. But it turns out that QR code generators have turned sour over the past years. It took several Google results to find a generator that would not just let you enter data, but actually download the code with no sign up. These shady business practices, trying to pry any amount of data from us, leads to frustration, friction in our day-to-day work, and a growing distaste for anything online.
With OpenKit, we hope to counter this dynamic, or at least provide an island of relief in the sea of despair on the internet. We hope to create a large registry of tools, all of which follow the basic principles that we have outlined here. If you know of a tool that is not yet part of this registry, please tell us on GitHub so that we can add it!