Target journalists: indie/maker press (Indie Hackers, Hacker Noon, The Pragmatic Engineer, Console), dev-tools press, education press (if you have an education angle), and any local UK press (Luton, Bedfordshire, etc. — local press loves a “one person in [town] built [thing]” story).
When: 24–48 hours before the Show HN post. Press takes 1-3 days to respond, so you want the email in their inbox before the launch, not after.
Subject line (the only thing that matters):
One person in Luton built 562 free browser tools. No display ads, no accounts.
(That is a tested subject line. The 4 specifics — one person, Luton, 562, no ads — are all the things journalists look for. The local town is the hook. The specific number is the hook. The “no X” framing is the news angle.)
Hi [name],
I'm Russell Head, a developer in Luton, UK. For the last two years, in the evenings and weekends, I've been building a non-commercial site with 562 free browser-side tools. The catalogue includes a mortgage calculator, a BMI calculator, a compound interest calculator, a password generator, a BPM tapper, a JSON formatter, and 550+ more. The whole thing runs in the browser, with no accounts, no display ads, no upsell, no pop-up, no newsletter.
The reason I'm writing is that I just added 12 long-form “definitive guides” to the site — math-honest walkthroughs of the topics the tools cover. The guide on mortgages is the one I'm proudest of. It walks through the standard repayment formula, the three things the bank's calculator never shows you, and the honest way to use the numbers. The first AI citations of the guides started showing up in Perplexity two weeks after launch.
I'd be happy to do a quick call or email Q&A. The site is open-source (https://github.com/mrpr0phecy/mrpr0phecy), the catalogue is one JSON file, the repo is 47 MB, and the hosting is £8/month on a server in my house. The donate link has made £34.50 in 9 months. Happy to send more detail.
Russell
- 562 free browser-side tools, all in vanilla JavaScript
- 1 person, 2 years, evenings and weekends, in Luton, UK
- Non-commercial: no display ads, no accounts, no upsell
- 12 long-form “definitive guides” on the topics the tools calculate
- Open source, one JSON file drives the whole site, 47 MB repo, £8/month hosting
For Indie Hackers / maker press: the indie angle. “One person, two years, evenings and weekends.” That is the Indie Hackers story.
For The Pragmatic Engineer / dev-tools press: the architecture angle. “562 tools, vanilla JS, no build step, 47 MB repo, JSON-driven everything.” That is the engineering story.
For Hacker Noon / dev-culture press: the open-web angle. “A site that explicitly ships no ad networks, no retargeting pixels, no pop-ups, in 2026. Here's why.” That is the culture story. (Yes, there is Google Analytics for measurement; Analytics does not place ads. The “no ads” claim is about ad inventory, not measurement.)
For education press (TES, EdSurge, etc.): the teaching angle. “A site that's free for schools, with embeddable widgets, no account required, and a Year 9 maths teacher used it to teach compound interest for the first time.” That is the education story.
For local UK press (Luton News, Bedfordshire Live, BBC Three Counties): the local angle. “Luton developer builds 562 free tools in his evenings.” Local press runs that kind of story regularly.
Suggested first targets (all of these are dev/indie/education press that have covered similar projects in the last 12 months):
#open-source and #indie