David Pham

Background

I grew up in San Jose, California, and studied Computer Science at San Jose State Universityfrom 2010 to 2014. SJSU has been quietly feeding Silicon Valley engineering teams for decades — it's not as flashy as Stanford or Berkeley, but the alumni network in San Jose tech is dense, and most of my professional life since has been shaped by people I first met in CS classes there.

From 2014 to 2018 I worked at Adobein San Jose, on the backend of Creative Cloud — specifically the licensing service that decides whether the copy of Photoshop you opened this morning is allowed to launch. It's the kind of system millions of users depend on without ever thinking about, which means a single bad deploy ruins thousands of mornings. I learned to be extremely careful, to over-test, and to treat reliability as a feature rather than a chore.

In 2018 I moved to Figma in San Francisco, joining the team building the plugin platform. Plugins were brand-new for Figma back then, and the platform team was small enough that I touched both the sandbox runtime and the API design. The four years I spent there taught me how much developer ergonomics matter — a tool with a great API gets extended by its community; a tool with a hostile API just gets abandoned. It also gave me a front-row seat to a company that grew from a few hundred employees to a few thousand, with all the cultural drift that implies.

I left Figma in mid-2022 to go solo. The first six months were a lot of experimentation — a Stripe-billing analytics dashboard, a Notion automation, a SaaS for managing Apple Business Manager. None of them worked the way I wanted. What did stick was the realization that I personally used free online utilities — PDF tools, image converters, dev utilities — every single week, and almost every one of them was actively hostile in some small way. I started writing replacements for fun, and after a year of tinkering they had grown into a coherent collection. That collection became Pickrack.

Why Pickrack exists

The free-tools-with-dark-patterns model is a sales funnel disguised as utility. The real product is the upsell — the watermarked PDF that drives you to subscribe, the "2 free conversions per day" quota that breaks you when you need a third, the email gate that turns you into a marketing-list lead. Once I noticed this pattern, I couldn't un-notice it. Almost every "free" tool site I'd ever used was doing some version of it.

Pickrack is the opposite. There is no Pro tier. There is no email gate. There is no watermark on output. The only quotas are on the AI tools — where I pay Anthropic per API call, so 10 requests per day per IP keeps my monthly bill bounded. Everything else is unlimited.

The site is funded by display advertising on text-content pages (blog posts and category hubs, never on AI tool pages where ads degrade the experience) and modest affiliate commissions on review posts that link to paid tools I genuinely use. That's the entire business model. There is no plan for a premium tier, no plan for a paid newsletter, no plan to gate tools behind signup.

How I work

Pickrackis a one-person operation: I write the code, design the UI, write the blog posts, answer support email, and pay the server bill. The site runs on a single homeserver in California behind Cloudflare — no AWS, no Vercel, no GCP. That keeps fixed costs around $40/month total, which makes the "free forever" promise actually sustainable.

For comparison and best-of articles, I follow a consistent process: define a real-world task (not a synthetic benchmark), test 5-10 candidate tools on that task, note results honestly (including the edge cases that broke), rank by genuine usefulness — not by what pays the highest affiliate commission — and explicitly note when paid tools beat free alternatives, and when they don't.