About FreeCareerTools

Who runs this

This site is built and written by Trace Bailey, founder & editor. Software engineer who got tired of resume tools that demand an account, paywall the download button, and invent statistics to sell a subscription. FreeCareerTools is the opposite of that: every tool runs in your browser, nothing is uploaded, and nothing is gated.

It is a one-person project, not a company with a content team. That is worth knowing when you decide how much weight to give the advice here: there is no panel of certified career coaches behind it. What there is instead is a strict rule against publishing numbers that cannot be attributed, tools whose logic is documented in public, and a changelog that records our own mistakes with the dates they were found. Judge the site on that rather than on credentials it does not have.

Found something wrong? Say so. Factual errors get fixed first and logged publicly.

Why it exists

Almost every resume tool follows the same pattern. You fill in your work history, watch a preview build, feel good about it — and then hit a paywall on the download button. Your data is already in their database by that point, and the "free" ATS score that told you your resume was 62% optimised was measuring nothing in particular.

This site is the inversion of that. There is no account, no download gate, no paid tier, and nothing to upgrade to. The tools run in your browser, which is not a privacy promise so much as a structural fact: there is no server to send your resume to.

What we will not do

• No invented statistics. The widely repeated claim that applicant tracking systems auto-reject 75% of resumes has no traceable source. We explain where it came from instead of repeating it to sell you something.
• No fake scores. Nothing here predicts whether you will get an interview, and nothing produces an "ATS score". The resume checker gives a score and tells you precisely which checks produced it.
• No account, ever. There is no sign-up, no email wall, and no "create a free account to download".
• No data collection. Your drafts live in your browser's local storage. Nothing you type is sent anywhere. That also means we cannot recover it for you — export anything you want to keep.
• No tools we cannot build honestly. There is deliberately no take-home pay calculator and no unemployment benefit estimator here, because a free web page cannot get those right for most people. The editorial policy lists what we refuse to build and why.

How it is funded

The site is not currently making any money. Advertising is the intended funding model and space is reserved for it, but no ads are being served at the moment and no advertising cookies are set. When that changes it will be disclosed on the advertising disclosure page, and advertising will still have no influence on what is published.

What is here

20 interactive tools, covering document writing, checking a resume against a specific posting, interview preparation, application tracking, and a set of pay and offer calculators. Role-specific guidance for 25 professions across healthcare, the trades, logistics, education, finance, technology and administration — this is not a site that only serves software engineers. And 9 in-depth guides on the questions the tools cannot answer alone.

The full list is here.

On AI

The tools contain none. They are deterministic — the same input always produces the same output — and they make no network calls, which is exactly why the privacy claim above is checkable rather than a promise. The trade-off is real: output is a well-structured starting point that you must edit into your own voice, not a finished document.

Written guidance is drafted with software assistance and reviewed by a person before it goes up. The rules in the editorial policy apply either way, and the ban on unattributed statistics exists precisely because generated text is very good at producing confident, plausible, invented numbers.

Get in touch

Feedback, corrections, and bug reports all go to the same place: the contact page, or hello@freecareertools.com.