About

Chief Tools is a collection of online tools. Most of the tools started from side projects to fill a need at the time or to improve on existing solutions. Since 2015 Chief Tools has been expanding on these tools and we are happy to share them with you! We try to keep them useful for ourselves and for you and maybe most importantly free or affordable for everyone.

Alboweb B.V. (trading as Chief Tools) is the Dutch company and legal entity that owns and operates Chief Tools. Alboweb B.V. is privately owned by Alex Bouma.

Alex Bouma started the development on almost all Chief Tools and is still the main developer and sole owner. Over the years a lot of people have contributed big and small to the tools (both paid and as open source contributions) and we are very grateful for that.

• Bill.DO (2020; acquired in 2022)
  Bill.DO started at SnapShooter. Since other priorities came up they decided it best to shut down Bill.DO, I found the tool very useful so I acquired it so it wouldn't be shutdown, today it's being used by many DigitalOcean users to keep an eye on their spending.

• Tny (2019)
  Tny is a URL shortener and was developed because a simple URL shortener that was easy to use and had a nice UI and API without too many bells and whistles was needed. Later on we added a custom domain feature to allow users to bring their own domain, not only to create short links for them but also to redirect them completely to another domain. We also added integrations with 3rd party tools like Make and Zapier to make integration quicker. Today Tny powers thousands of links and redirects.

• Deploy Chief (2020)
  Deploy Chief was developed because a tool was needed to deploy Laravel with zero downtime to multiple servers. The current tool in the Laravel space at the time was Envoyer but didn't fit our needs. Today Deploy Chief not only deploys all Chief Tools but also many other PHP and Laravel applications.

• Account Chief (2018)
  To make it easier to bootstrap a new tool without needing to re-implement auth, teams or billing we developed Account Chief and the Chief SDK (which is open source if you are curious). It allows all our tools to share auth, team management, billing and many more boilerplate with minimal code.

• Pkgtrends (2018)
  Pkgtrends started from a desire to see how package downloads compared across ecosystems. It started from a conversation in the Sentry Slack by David Cramer. Pkgtrends is open source.

• Tool Chief / Chief Utilities (2017)
  Tool Chief is a collection of utilities and tools that are not large enough to be standalone. Since having Tool Chief being a Chief Tools product is a bit confusing it was renamed to Chief Utilities in 2022.

• Cert Chief (2016)
  Cert Chief started as a tool to check the expiration date of SSL certificates and has grown into a tool to check the overal health and security posture of a domain monitoring thousands of domains today.

• Server Chief (2015) (discontinued in 2022)
  Server Chief was the first tool developed and was the start of Chief Tools. But because of lack of interest by users was eventually discontinued because the maintenance burden was too high. Server Chief was a tool to execute scripts on multiple servers at once.