Afoxlabs Labs

Free tools, built in public, tested like client work

Labs is our product experiment programme. A small number of genuinely free tools, each one a real production system that we develop, test, monitor and keep running using exactly the practices we sell. It is the most honest portfolio a quality company can have.

Proof you can inspect

Anyone evaluating a QA partner can look at something we operate ourselves, rather than taking a case study on faith.

Where our tooling comes from

Problems we hit repeatedly become reusable internal tools. Some of those become the tools on this page.

A controlled way to learn product

Strictly secondary to the services business. Small enough to shut down without drama if nobody uses it.

The tools

What is being built

Status is stated honestly below. Nothing here is announced as finished before it is, and anything that fails to earn its keep will be retired rather than quietly left to rot.

Afoxlabs API Tester

In development

For: Developers and QA engineers

A browser-based API client that needs no account and no install. Build a request, save a collection to a shareable link, run a small suite, read the diff between two responses. Built because the established tools have grown heavy and account-gated for what is often a two-minute job.

Why this one

Directly reinforces what we do. The people who need it are the people we work with.

Afoxlabs Schema Diff

In development

For: API teams and reviewers

Paste two OpenAPI or JSON Schema versions and get a plain-language breaking-change report: removed fields, narrowed types, newly required properties, changed enums. The check most teams only run after a client integration has already broken.

Why this one

Solves a real recurring pain, and it is the kind of check we build into client pipelines.

Afoxlabs Flake Radar

Planned

For: Teams with an automated suite they no longer trust

Upload JUnit or Playwright results from recent runs and get a ranked flakiness report — which tests are intermittent, how much CI time they waste, and whether the pattern looks like timing, shared state or a genuine intermittent bug.

Why this one

Flakiness is the single most common reason a suite stops being believed. This is our own internal tooling, made public.

Afoxlabs Invoice

Planned

For: Freelancers and small studios

A free, no-signup invoice generator that produces a clean PDF and remembers your details locally. Deliberately small: no accounting suite, no upsell ladder, no feature creep.

Why this one

The one tool here aimed at a business rather than a technical audience — a controlled experiment in whether that audience is worth serving.

Want to be told when one of these goes live? Email us and we will add you to a short list — one message per launch, nothing else.

Operating rules

Constraints that keep Labs from eating the business

Side projects are how service companies quietly lose focus. These rules exist to prevent that, and they are enforced rather than aspirational.

  • Small, useful, cheap to run, measurable, and easy to shut down.
  • Never more than one in active development at a time.
  • Free means free — no signup for the core function, no dark patterns, no advertising.
  • Each one runs on the same CI, test automation and monitoring we would build for a client.
  • Branded quietly: "Built and maintained by Afoxlabs", not a banner across the product.
  • Judged on retention and usefulness, never on raw traffic.
  • The services business always stays financially ahead of the tools.

How we judge them

Retention, not downloads

A tool with modest traffic and strong retention is worth more than one with a large launch spike and nobody coming back. These are the measures that decide whether a tool continues.

Returning users
Whether the tool is genuinely useful, or was a one-time curiosity.
Active users
Ongoing value, as distinct from a spike of launch-day attention.
Organic traffic
Whether it can be discovered without us promoting it.
Cost per active user
Whether it is sustainable to keep running at all.
Signups, where relevant
Willingness to establish a relationship, not just to visit.
Conversion to paid, eventually
The only honest signal that something could become a product.

One thing we want to be straight about

Labs is a secondary engine. The large majority of our effort goes into client work, and it should — a quality company that neglects its clients to polish side projects has failed at the one thing it sells. If you are evaluating Afoxlabs, judge us on the services and on how we work. Labs is supporting evidence, not the pitch.

Start with a free QA Health Check

Answer twelve questions about how your team tests today. You get a maturity score, the three gaps most likely to cause a production incident, and a 30/60/90-day roadmap — whether or not you ever work with us.