StripHTML.com started during my parental leave in 2011, the year my first child was born. He is a teenager now, and so is the site. Somewhere between feeds and naps I kept hitting the same small irritation: I needed to clean up a bit of messy text, usually to get rid of HTML tags, and every option was heavier than the job deserved. Open an editor, find the right regex, run it, close the editor — for something that should take three seconds.
So I built the thing I wanted. One text box, one button, plain text back. I did a bit of keyword research first and found that a lot of people were searching for “strip html”, which suggested I was not the only one with the problem.
That turned out to be true. The one-page tool found an audience almost immediately, and people started asking for the neighbouring jobs: counting characters, converting case, stripping line breaks, decoding entities. The site grew one tool at a time, always the same way. Someone runs into a small text problem, writes in about it, and a few weeks later there is a page for it.
Fifteen years on there are more than thirty tools across two sections, and the site gets used thousands of times a week. It is still built the same way it was on day one.
One developer, the same one since 2011. There is no team, no investor and no roadmap, and every tool on the site is written by hand rather than assembled from libraries or generated.
I would rather keep the tools in front than myself, so you will not find a photo or a bio here. I am not hard to reach, though. Write to contact@striphtml.com and you will get a reply from an actual person. A good number of the tools on this site exist because somebody did exactly that.
If you want to check that the site is roughly as old as it claims, the Internet Archive has crawls of it going back to 2012. It went live the year before that, but nobody was archiving it yet.
None of them use an AI model. Every tool here is deterministic string processing, which means the same input always gives the same output. There is nothing to queue, nothing to rate limit, and no API bill that would eventually turn into a paywall or a signup form.
Some of it is fiddlier than it looks. Take removing an em dash. You cannot just delete the character, because the spacing around it has to be rebuilt afterwards or you end up with “word , word”, or with two words fused together. A dash sitting alone at the end of a line has to vanish completely rather than leave a dangling comma behind. Line breaks have to survive all of it untouched. Multiply that by thirty tools and fifteen years of edge cases people have written in about, and you have most of what this site actually is.
Almost every tool runs entirely in your browser, so what you paste never leaves your machine. The one exception is the Strip HTML tool on the front page, which processes your text on the server, in memory, and never writes it anywhere. The privacy policy says exactly which is which.
Advertising pays for the hosting. The ads set cookies, which is why you get a consent banner on your first visit, and the privacy policy spells out what that involves.
What there is not: a signup, an account, a pro tier, an upsell, a watermark or a daily limit. There never has been, and I have no plans to add one. I would rather run a few ads than put a login in front of something that should take three seconds to use.
Thanks for stopping by, and for using the tools. If you have an idea for another one, let me know.