I’ve been twisting, spinning, and torturing plain text files for years. Keyword lists, in particular, drove me half mad long before I built anything to fix it: paste a hundred phrases into a spreadsheet, discover forty of them were duplicates with different capitalisation, spend twenty minutes cleaning it by hand, then do the exact same thing again a week later on a different list.
That’s the whole reason PhraseFoundry exists. Not a business plan, not a gap-in-the-market spreadsheet exercise. Just years of doing the same fiddly text work by hand, deciding I was done doing it manually, and building tools that actually solve the specific problems I kept running into.
Why Build Your Own Tools Rather Than Just Using What Exists
I’ve actually done this before, properly. Years ago I built and sold a keyword tool called Keyword Evolution for $97, and it sold several hundred times over. It did a lot of what PhraseFoundry does now, but it was wizard-driven: you followed a set sequence of steps in a fixed order, because that’s how the tool was built.
PhraseFoundry does most of the same jobs, for free, and does them better. There’s no wizard forcing you down one path. Clean a list, then group it, then check the word count, in whatever order actually suits the job in front of you, or skip steps entirely if you don’t need them. That’s the difference between a tool built to walk a customer through a process, and a tool built purely to get the job done.
Plenty of keyword and SEO tools already exist, and many are excellent. Most, though, are built around subscriptions, so the genuinely useful features sit behind a paywall. That’s a perfectly reasonable business model. It just wasn’t the one I wanted for the repetitive jobs I found myself doing every week. Cleaning a keyword list, generating URL slugs, checking a word count against a readability score, these aren’t things that need an account, a login, or a monthly fee. They need a page that does the job properly and gets out of your way. So PhraseFoundry runs on a simple rule: no accounts, no feature gates, no premium tier hiding the useful functionality. Your data stays in your browser and isn’t stored anywhere. If a tool’s genuinely useful, it should just work, not tempt you into upgrading to get the version that actually solves your problem.
If a tool’s genuinely useful, it should just work, not tempt you into upgrading to get the version that actually solves your problem.
The Toolkit So Far
Everything currently on PhraseFoundry grew out of a real problem I’d hit while doing actual keyword or content work, not a feature list someone brainstormed in a meeting.
Keyword Scrubber cleans and deduplicates keyword lists using seventeen configurable rules. Empty lines, stray metadata, inconsistent casing, straightforward duplicates, all handled in seconds rather than by hand.
Keyword Bloom takes seed keywords and expands them into variations, useful for building out ad groups or a content plan from a handful of starting phrases rather than staring at a blank page trying to think of every angle yourself.
Keyword Combiner generates permutations from multiple word lists, handy for ad variations, product name brainstorming, or working out domain ideas from a set of building blocks.
Keyword Grouper clusters keywords automatically by shared terms, word count, or custom rules, turning a big unsorted dump of keywords into something you can actually organise a campaign around.
Word Counter Pro gives you the full picture on a piece of text: characters, words, sentences, paragraphs, reading time, and readability scores including Flesch-Kincaid and Gunning Fog, in one place rather than four different sites.
Case Chameleon converts text between capitalisation styles, lowercase, UPPERCASE, Title Case, Sentence case, camelCase, snake_case, whatever the job in front of you actually needs.
Slug Generator turns any text into a clean, URL-friendly slug, handling accented characters and stripping anything that doesn’t belong in a permalink.
Who Actually Uses These
I didn’t build these for four different audiences. I built them because I kept hitting the same repetitive text-processing problems myself. Over time I realised those same jobs crop up whether you’re doing SEO, writing content, managing PPC campaigns, or developing software.
SEO specialists cleaning up keyword exports, expanding variations, and getting data ready for campaigns without the manual tidy-up first.
Content writers checking word counts and readability, generating slugs, and reformatting text without switching between half a dozen browser tabs to do it.
PPC managers building keyword combinations for ad groups and organising bulk lists pulled from multiple sources.
Developers handling the string manipulation and text processing tasks that turn up constantly and rarely justify writing a script from scratch.
What’s Coming
The toolkit keeps growing, and the next addition is one I’m genuinely looking forward to: a tool that takes a large keyword list, batches it into groups of five, and generates a direct Google Trends comparison link for each group. Paste in a hundred keywords, get twenty links back, and you can work through them checking which keywords actually show real search interest and which are dead weight. No manual copy-pasting into Trends over and over.
Beyond that, there’s a SERP Simulator on the way, for previewing how titles and meta descriptions will actually look in Google’s results, along with a proper Find and Replace tool with regex support, a List Comparer for spotting what’s unique or shared between two lists, a Text Splitter for breaking content into chunks, and an HTML Stripper for pulling clean text out of markup.
I’ll also be writing longer explainers here on the mechanics behind some of this, things like how Google Trends actually works under the hood, and practical ways to gauge real keyword competition across Google and other search engines, rather than just trusting a single difficulty score. Those are proper topics in their own right, so they’ll get their own dedicated write-ups rather than a rushed paragraph here.
Why This Matters More Than It Sounds
None of this is complicated engineering. That’s rather the point. I build these tools using vibe coding, describing what I want to an AI assistant and reviewing what comes back, the same workflow I’ve written about elsewhere on this site. It works here because I can describe exactly what a tool needs to do in plain English before I ever start prompting. After twenty-odd years writing PHP, I already know the shape of the problem; the AI just gets me there faster than typing every line myself would.
When something breaks while I’m building one of these tools, I don’t reach for elaborate debugging tools first. I drop numbered debug points through the code, log statements that just say “reached point 12,” “reached point 15,” and so on. If point 11 shows up in the log but point 12 never does, I know exactly where to start looking. It’s not clever. It’s just fast, and fast is what you want when you’re the only one who has to understand the code six months later.
None of this is complicated engineering. That’s rather the point.
Every tool here started small. I build a handful of core features first, use it properly on real work, and only add more once I know the basics genuinely hold up. Some tools are done, they do their one job and don’t need anything else. Others are still growing, based on what I run into myself or what people tell me they’re missing.
The value isn’t in doing something nobody else has thought of, it’s in doing the boring, repetitive part of the job properly, for free, without the usual friction of accounts and upsells and feature walls. I built these because I needed them on real projects, and I still use every one of them myself, which is usually the best test of whether a tool’s actually worth keeping around.
If there’s a specific text-processing headache you keep running into, I’d genuinely like to hear about it. The tools that end up here are the ones that solve a problem someone’s actually had, not the ones that look good on a roadmap.