# Free Tool Desk

> Paste what your company does (what you sell, who buys, the deal size, how many leads become customers or what a lead is worth) and your notes on one free-tool idea you want to give away as marketing - a calculator, a generator, a grader or analyzer, a tester, a library or an interactive quiz. The browser works out what a lead is worth, the leads a month, the first year's lead value against the build plus the upkeep, the payback and the leads a month the first year needs, and flags the skill's pitfalls. A paid score lane rates the skill's eight factors and says build, build smaller or don't build; a paid plan lane scopes the minimum viable tool.

URL: https://free-tool-desk.skillsafe.ai/
API tutorial: https://free-tool-desk.skillsafe.ai/api.html

## Who it is for

Founders and marketers at software and service companies weighing "engineering as marketing": a free tool built to earn leads, links or reach. They want to know whether the idea is worth the build and the upkeep, how small the first version can be, how to gate it, and which numbers say it worked.

## The free math (in the browser, no model)

- The tool notes as labelled lines ("Type: calculator", "Keyword: "roi calculator" - 2,400 searches a month", "Existing tools: ...", "Build: one engineer, 2 weeks, $8,000", "Maintenance: $150 a month", "Expected visitors: 2,500 a month", "Visitor-to-lead: 6%", "Gating: partially gated") or prose.
- What a lead is worth: stated, or the deal size (ACV) times the share of leads that become customers. Leads a month: stated, or visitors times the visitor-to-lead rate. Build effort in engineer-weeks; upkeep per month (yearly and quarterly amounts converted).
- Over 12 months: the first year's lead value, the first year's cost (build plus maintenance), value over cost, the payback in months and the leads a month the first year needs to pay for itself.
- An optional self-scored eight-factor scorecard with the skill's bands (25+ strong candidate, 15-24 promising, under 15 reconsider).
- Flags FT-01..FT-12: a first year that costs more than its leads are worth, no lead value, no build cost, no searches or traffic, no upkeep, scraping or third-party APIs, features the skill skips at first (accounts, saved results, dashboards), a build past 4 engineer-weeks, success counted in visitors or usage, no gate, no existing tools named, no goal.
- Exports: the math as Markdown and CSV.

## The paid lanes (one system prompt, routed on `task`)

- `score`: build, build smaller or don't build (don't build under 15; build only at 25+ with no FT-01 or FT-08); the eight factors (search demand exists, audience match to buyers, uniqueness vs existing, natural path to product, build feasibility, maintenance burden (inverse), link-building potential, share-worthiness), each 1-5 with a reason and, for a 4 or 5, a quote; the total and band; a reading of the page's math; the closest case from the skill's library (Unsplash, HubSpot Website Grader, Baremetrics Forecasting, CoSchedule Headline Analyzer, Moz Keyword Explorer, Buffer Salary Calculator, Shopify Hatchful); the four pitfalls (over-engineering, poor product integration, maintenance and security debt, vanity metrics), quoted; the gate (fully gated, partially gated, ungated + optional, ungated entirely); the build route (build custom, no-code, embed existing); conditions and what to check.
- `plan`: the one job; what the visitor enters and gets back; what to skip in the first version; lead capture (gate, value exchange, email first, one qualifying question); the path from the tool to the product; the landing keyword and 1-3 supporting pieces; the launch that earns links; the build route; 4-8 milestones ordered scope, build, launch, measure; exactly three metrics (leads, qualification rate, trial or signup conversion) with targets only from the input; maintenance owner, cadence and what breaks first.

Every reply is checked against the input: quotes word for word, the scorecard arithmetic and bands, the verdict rules, the enumerations, the milestone order, no vanity metric, and no invented cost, count, rate, date or duration.

## Source

Derived from the agent skill @coreyhaines31/free-tools (https://skillsafe.ai/skill/@coreyhaines31/free-tools), by Corey Haines, in coreyhaines31/marketingskills (MIT): https://github.com/coreyhaines31/marketingskills/tree/main/skills/free-tools - its core principles, tool types, ideation and validation questions, gating options, SEO and link-building pattern, build-versus-buy routes, minimum viable tool, evaluation scorecard and common pitfalls; and its references (references/tool-types.md and references/tool-benchmarks.md): the six tool types with examples, and the case library with its published numbers.

Runs on gpt-terra. Part of SkillSafe (https://skillsafe.ai/).