Pikkola Lab — an independent software studio · Seoul
Software, made by hand.
Honest, minimalist tools for async teams and independent builders. Six of them are live, three small books are on the shelf, and none of it watches you back.
- 06 tools live
- 03 field guides
- 00 accounts to create
- 00 subscriptions
- 00 cookies
§ 0Manifesto
Written between deploys, 8–9 November 2026, in a room that has one window.
Why we keep making small things
The modern web is very good at getting between you and a small task. A page that needs three megabytes of JavaScript to compare two dates. A cookie banner on a site that sets no cookies. A monthly subscription for a tool that converts a timestamp.
We kept meeting those pages while working across Seoul, London and New York, so we started writing the small ones ourselves. The rule has not changed since the first: one page, one job, no account, nothing collected. If the work can be done in the browser, it stays in the browser.
This is not a business in the usual shape. Six tools are free and will stay free. Three field guides cost five dollars each, because the domain has to be paid for somehow — we would rather sell you a book once than rent you a button forever.
- 01Fast before beautiful. A tool has to be useful on a train with one bar of signal. This page is a single HTML file and it is not waiting for anything.
- 02No account, ever. Nothing to sign up for, nothing to cancel, nothing to remember. Opening the page is the whole onboarding.
- 03Nothing about you is recorded. No analytics, no cookies, no session replay, no third-party requests — not as a setting you can switch off, but as the way it is built.1
- 04Built to outlive us. Static files at the edge. If we stop touching a tool, it keeps working, and costs nothing to keep working.
- 05No dark patterns. No upsell inside a tool, no pop-up on the way out, no countdown on a price. If something costs money, the price is written on it.
1 The only numbers we can see are Cloudflare's edge request totals, which record that a page was served — not who asked for it.
§ 1The Shelf
Six instruments
Each one was written to end a specific annoyance we had ourselves. All free, all running in your browser, all still standing as of this evening.
Pikkola Time
Put every city in a call on one clock, score the hours that fall inside everyone's working day, and export the winner as a calendar file.
WhyI once booked a Thursday call that was already Friday for half the team.
Free · no account · EN/KO/JAOpen 02diff.pikkola.comPikkola Diff
Compare two versions of a text or a file without sending either anywhere. Word-level marks, side-by-side or unified, shareable by link.
WhyEvery diff tool we found wanted the file uploaded first. A contract clause is not something to hand to a stranger's server.
Free · no uploadOpen 03rank.pikkola.comPikkola Rank
Read a Korean blog draft the way the platform will: length, repetition, risky medical claims, keyword spread, and a score with the reason behind it.
WhySponsored drafts arrive at midnight with a three-day runway. This does the boring first pass so the writing gets the time.
Free · Korean blogsOpen 04meta.pikkola.comPikkola Meta
Fill in the seven tags that decide how a link looks in KakaoTalk, Slack, X and search — then copy them out with a preview for each platform.
WhyA link that unfurls as a naked URL in the group chat looks like bad news. It takes ten seconds to fix.
Free · 7 platformsOpen 05blog.pikkola.comPikkola Journal
Essays on distributed work, browser-side tooling, and writing for a web where the answer arrives before the link.
WhyWhere we write the reasoning down, including the approaches that turned out to be wrong.
Four essays · RSSRead 06tools.pikkola.comPikkola Tools
A directory of sixty-six tools for async teams and AI builders, each one opened and checked by hand before it went on the shelf.
WhyEvery “best tools” list we read was forty percent affiliate links and had clearly not opened the products.
Free · 66 tools · 6 shelvesOpenEverything above is checked by hand. If a link is broken tomorrow, it is not because a scraper moved it — write to us and we will fix it.
§ 2Field Guides
Three field guides, 158 pages between them. They took longer than the tools did.
Three field guides
Small books we wrote because the tools needed a manual — and because a book sold once pays better than a button rented forever. Five dollars, PDF, no DRM.
The Async Remote Playbook
Running a distributed team without the 21:00 call: the arithmetic of overlapping hours, five written rituals that replace the standup, and the handover note that ends the day.
46 pages · PDF + template$5 No. 2 — Field guideThe GEO Handbook
How an assistant decides which page to quote, what llms.txt actually does, and how to write passages a model can lift without mangling them.
The Zero-Dollar Micro-SaaS Stack
From an empty Cloudflare account to a paid product with no fixed costs: static hosting, a free database tier, and a deploy you can repeat on a Tuesday.
54 pages · PDF + notes$5Paid once, kept as a file. Gumroad handles the receipt and the download, and we send nothing else — no list, no sequence, no reminder that you left something in a cart.
§ 3Colophon
How this page is made
No framework, no build step, no CDN, no tag manager. This page is one hand-written HTML file, one stylesheet, and a short script that does three things: remembers whether you prefer paper or lamplight, keeps the Seoul clock honest, and underlines the section you are reading.
The type is Source Serif 4 for reading, Inter for the interface and JetBrains Mono for anything a machine wrote — all three free under the SIL Open Font License. They are cut down to the characters used here and served from this domain, so the fonts cost 139 kB instead of 1.2 MB and no font CDN learns that you visited.
Everything is static files on Cloudflare's edge. No server to keep awake, no database to back up, no instance to resize: hosting is zero and the domain is the only line item. For a page that mostly needs to sit still, that is the right architecture.
It also prints: black on white, sections breaking where they should, no dark panels fighting the paper in the tray.
- Document
- index.html · 26 kB
- Stylesheet
- styles.css · 14 kB
- Script
- app.js · 4 kB
- Type
- 4 × woff2 · 139 kB
- Page weight
- ~183 kB · 8 requests
- Cookies
- none
- Third parties
- none
- Build step
- none
- Hosting
- Cloudflare Pages · $0
What is not here
- No analytics, no cookies, no session recording — nothing to consent to, which is why there is no banner asking.
- No account, no email gate, no pop-up on the way out.
- No sponsored placement in the directory. If a link ever earns a commission, the card will say so before you click it.
- No stock photography, no illustration of a person pointing at a chart. The only pictures on this page are type, ruled lines and a stamp.
| Date | What went up | Note |
|---|---|---|
| 8 Nov 2026 | Time · Diff · Rank | three tools, one Sunday |
| 9 Nov 2026 | Meta | seven tags, seven previews |
| 9 Nov 2026 | Journal | four essays, RSS, no comments |
| 9 Nov 2026 | Tools | 66 tools, opened by hand |
| 9 Nov 2026 | This page | the gate you came through |
§ 4Status
Six services, one evening
Checked from a terminal in Seoul just before this page was uploaded. Times are Korea Standard Time.
| Service | Address | Answer | Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pikkola Time | time.pikkola.com | 200 | 23:14 |
| Pikkola Diff | diff.pikkola.com | 200 | 23:14 |
| Pikkola Rank | rank.pikkola.com | 200 | 23:14 |
| Pikkola Meta | meta.pikkola.com | 200 | 23:14 |
| Pikkola Journal | blog.pikkola.com | 200 | 23:14 |
| Pikkola Tools | tools.pikkola.com | 200 | 23:14 |
There is no monitor behind this table — the page is static, so the times are from the last deploy. A green dot here means “it was true when we published”, which we think is worth more than a live light that nobody is watching.