About ShinobiTools
The idea
Most "free" online tools aren't: three uses per day, a watermark across your download, or a sign-up wall right before the result. That's usually because every click costs the operator money: they rent AI computing power per second from a cloud provider.
ShinobiTools works differently, and the difference is embarrassingly simple: it all runs on computers I operate myself: a main machine in a room in the Netherlands, with two graphics cards in it and the electricity bill in my name, plus a few more computers I also run myself for the heavy jobs. The hardware is already bought and already on. One more restored photo or split song costs a few seconds of power, which is not enough to build a checkout page around. The advertising on the pages covers the rest.
The house rules
- Free means free: no accounts, no watermarks, a daily allowance stated up front (10 runs a day on most GPU tools), no "premium" version of the same feature.
- Files are deleted automatically: uploads right after processing, results within 45 minutes (up to 24 hours on StemGrab, ScribeGrab and PassportNinja if you have a pass). Nothing is used to train anything.
- Limits: where a tool has a real technical limit, it says so on the page instead of hiding it behind a paywall pitch.
- One thing per tool: each site does one job and does it properly, instead of one bloated everything-app.
The family
The metadata remover runs on its own page here on shinobitools.com. The other tools each have their own site: PicReviver (restore old photos), BGNinja (remove photo backgrounds), StemGrab (split songs into stems), PassportNinja (passport photos), ScribeGrab (transcription & subtitles), VideoBGNinja (video background removal), ScanReviver (clean document scans), CleanGrab (remove background noise from audio and video), ConvertNinja (convert images such as HEIC to JPG), WatermarkNinja (erase watermarks and overlays) and TextNinja (clean AI text markers from text).
Who builds this
One person. Every tool on this list is written, hosted and repaired by me, on those computers: there is no team behind the word "we", so I have stopped writing it. No investors, no growth targets, no roadmap beyond the next thing that annoys me enough to fix.
That has an upside and a downside, and you should know both. The upside: nothing here needs to make money from you, so nothing here is designed to. The downside: if two cards are busy your job waits in a queue, and if I am asleep when something breaks, it stays broken until morning. Both of those beat a subscription, in my opinion, but it is your call to make.
A tool you think should exist for free? The contact form comes to me.
About the name
One name across all of it. Sam Ridder is a pen name, and it is the same person behind every tool on this list. I would rather have one honest pseudonym than nine imaginary teams.