7 Amazing Developer Tools that you're not using yet

Seven productivity tools aimed at developers—spanning front-end performance, cloud planning, design, debugging, and animation—are presented as a practical way to “work smarter, not harder.” The through-line is that each tool removes a recurring time sink: measuring bundle impact, estimating infrastructure costs, iterating on UI and typography faster, manipulating DOM styles without manual CSS, organizing API requests, and building motion graphics that can flow into mobile development.

Bundle Phobia is positioned as the first stop for front-end teams trying to keep initial load times lean. By entering an NPM package name (or uploading a package.json), it reports how much a dependency adds to total bundle size, including download time and whether the package supports tree shaking. It also ranks dependencies by size across versions, making it easier to evaluate the cost of adding new libraries before they land in production.

CloudCraft follows for infrastructure planning and budgeting. Built around a drag-and-drop interface for AWS, it lets developers connect cloud services visually and then switch to a budget view for estimated cost breakdowns. Even if the user’s primary cloud is different, the pricing-model similarity across major providers is framed as a reason the estimates can still translate to Azure and GCP.

Figma is the best-known design tool on the list, but the emphasis here is on workflow and portability. It runs as a web app with desktop-level performance attributed to WebAssembly, and it stays free for the described graphic design needs. The browser-first approach means projects open instantly on any machine. Beyond drawing and mockups, it includes developer-friendly “superpowers,” such as locking events on elements and exporting styles as CSS or as Android/iOS style definitions.

For typography selection, Font Flipper is presented as a focused alternative to manually hunting through Google Fonts. Built with Angular and Firebase, it uses a Tinder-style swipe interface—swipe left to reject, right to like—then lets users download chosen fonts directly from Google Fonts. The simplicity is framed as the point: fewer distractions, faster decisions.

Viz Bug is a Chrome extension for visual DOM interaction. It overlays highlighted elements (shown as pink “lions”) across a live page, enabling measurement, movement, and style changes directly in the browser. The payoff is speed: once a layout or style looks right, developers can copy the resulting CSS from the inspector rather than rewriting from scratch. It also supports searching for element types (like links) to quickly locate and edit groups.

Insomnia rounds out the back-end tooling with an API debugging workflow. It helps organize reusable values and avoids retyping repetitive HTTP requests. For GraphQL, it performs introspection automatically so typing a query yields IntelliSense-style suggestions, improving the developer experience when building against APIs such as the SpaceX GraphQL endpoint.

Finally, Flare targets 2D vector animation creation. With keyframes for motion over time and an open design ecosystem for inspiration, it’s pitched as a way to export animations into Flutter—aiming to make high-performance native mobile animation implementation more straightforward.

A closing note ties the list together: all seven tools are free, built with web technologies, and intended to streamline common developer tasks across the product lifecycle.