In a world saturated with aggressive marketing, there's a quiet revolution happening: companies are building genuinely useful tools and giving them away for free. Not as loss leaders. Not with aggressive upsells. Just... free.
At Dreams.fm, we've embraced this philosophy wholeheartedly. Today, we're launching our free tools section—starting with a JSON Formatter and Color Palette Generator, with more on the way. But this isn't just about the tools themselves. It's about a fundamental shift in how we think about marketing.
The Problem with Traditional Marketing
Traditional digital marketing has become a race to the bottom. Every company is fighting for the same keywords, bidding up ad costs, and creating content that's more about gaming search algorithms than providing genuine value. The result?
- Users are increasingly blind to ads
- Customer acquisition costs continue to rise
- "Content marketing" has become synonymous with SEO-stuffed fluff
- Trust in brands is at an all-time low
We wanted to do something different.
What is Engineering as Marketing?
Engineering as marketing is simple in concept but challenging in execution: instead of spending resources on advertising, you build genuinely useful tools that solve real problems for your target audience. These tools become your marketing.
The key principles:
- Genuine utility first. The tool must solve a real problem, not just exist to capture emails.
- No strings attached. Free means free. No "sign up to use" barriers. No data harvesting.
- Quality matters. If you're showcasing your engineering capabilities, the tool better be good.
- Solve adjacent problems. The tools should be useful to your potential customers, even if they're not directly related to your main product.
Why This Works
1. Trust Through Demonstration
Anyone can claim they build great products. Few actually prove it before asking for money. When someone uses your free JSON formatter and it works beautifully, they've experienced your quality firsthand. That's worth more than a thousand testimonials.
2. Organic Discovery
Good tools get shared. When a developer finds a color palette generator that actually understands color theory and exports to Tailwind config, they tell their team. They bookmark it. They come back. And eventually, they remember who built it when they need something more.
3. SEO That Serves Users
Search engines are increasingly good at identifying content that actually helps users versus content that just games algorithms. Tools that genuinely help people naturally attract links, shares, and return visits—all signals that improve organic rankings without any manipulation.
4. Compound Returns
Unlike ads that stop working the moment you stop paying, useful tools continue to drive traffic indefinitely. Every tool we build adds to our portfolio of helpful resources. The effect compounds over time.
Our Approach
For Dreams.fm, we're building tools that serve developers and creatives—the same people who might eventually need our AI-powered creative studio. Here's what we're launching:
Available Now
- JSON Formatter — Format, validate, and beautify JSON with syntax highlighting, tree view, and minification.
- Color Palette Generator — Generate harmonious color schemes using color theory, extract from images, export as CSS or Tailwind.
Coming Soon
- Image Optimizer — Compress images for web without losing quality
- CSS Gradient Generator — Visual gradient editor with code export
- Code Beautifier — Format JavaScript, TypeScript, HTML, CSS, and more
- Text Analyzer — Word count, reading time, readability scores
What We're Not Doing
Just as important as what we're building is what we're avoiding:
- No email gates. You can use every tool without signing up for anything.
- No data collection. Your JSON and images stay in your browser. We don't see them.
- No aggressive upsells. Yes, there's a subtle CTA for Dreams.fm, but the tools work perfectly without it.
- No crippled "free" versions. The free tool is the full tool.
The Long-Term Vision
We believe the future of marketing is value-first. Companies that help their potential customers before asking for anything in return will build the strongest brands. Companies that treat every interaction as an opportunity to extract value will find it increasingly difficult to build trust.
Our free tools are just the beginning. We're committed to building resources that make developers' and creators' lives easier—whether or not they ever become Dreams.fm customers.
If you find our tools useful, we'd love to hear about it. And if you're building something that could use an AI-powered creative studio, we'd love to help with that too. But either way, the tools are yours to use.
That's engineering as marketing. That's the future we're building toward.
Explore our free tools or learn more about what Dreams.fm can do for your creative projects.
