About Boring Utils
A small studio that makes reliable utilities for people who build and run things online. We pick jobs that are dull, easy to forget and expensive to get wrong, and we do them carefully.
What we make
Expiry Watch tells you before a TLS certificate or a domain registration lapses. It checks a site’s certificate (expiry, issuer, chain and hostname match) and when its domain expires, and it monitors up to three domains for free, with email alerts 30, 14, 7, 3 and 1 day before expiry.
Chart Link turns CSV or JSON into a chart you can put anywhere: an email, a Slack message, a README, a PDF. The builder runs in your browser and exports SVG or PNG files, so your data never leaves your device.
Alongside the tools we write guides on the problems they exist for: shrinking certificate lifetimes, chain errors, RDAP lookups, and getting charts into places where JavaScript can’t run.
How we work
- One job each
- Each utility does one thing, tells you plainly what it found, and gets out of the way.
- Failures look like failures
- If a check can’t finish, because a site is down or a lookup times out, you see a failed check. It is never shown as expired, and never as fine.
- Alerts, not promises
- We tell you what we found and when something is due. We never claim a site is secure, compliant or safe from anything going wrong.
- Email you asked for
- We only email addresses that confirmed they want our email, and every message has a one-click unsubscribe.
- As little data as the job needs
- An email address, the domains you watch, and their check results for 90 days. No tracking cookies, no ads, no selling data. The privacy policy lists everything.
- Files you keep
- Charts export as plain SVG and PNG files. Once you have them, they work anywhere, without us.
About the name
The best utilities are the ones you stop thinking about: they do the same job the same way every time, and you only remember them on the day they save you. That’s the kind of boring we’re aiming for. The work itself gets our full attention.
How we write guides
- Every command in a guide is run before publishing, and the output shown is what it printed.
- Every date, standard and limit links to its primary source: the standard, the vendor’s documentation or the announcement.
- Each guide lists its sources with the date we checked them, and shows when it was last updated.
- When we couldn’t verify something, we leave it out or say so.
If you find a mistake, write to hello@boringutils.com. We fix errors and update the date.
How we plan to make money
Everything that works today is free. We plan paid Pro plans for people who need more: more domains and faster alerts in Expiry Watch, hosted chart images in Chart Link. They aren’t available yet; the pricing page shows the plans and their planned prices. We don’t run ads, and we don’t sell your data or share it with advertisers.
Contact
Questions, bug reports, corrections and ideas: hello@boringutils.com. A person reads every message.