Shipping globaltimeconvert.com

I shipped a thing. globaltimeconvert.com is a fast, ad-free, cookieless timezone converter. Six languages, ~2,500 cities, fully open source. It’s been a few months in the making and the launch felt like a decent excuse to write down why it exists.

Why

The honest version: every time I needed to convert a time across zones, I ended up on pages packed with ads, cookie banners, autoplaying videos, and ten widgets I didn’t ask for. Looking up “what time is it in Tokyo” shouldn’t require dismissing three popups. So I built the version I actually wanted to use.

I kept the constraint list short and wrote it down before writing any code:

No ads. Ever.
No cookies, no fingerprinting, and so no cookie banner.
No third-party trackers.
No accounts.
No embeddable widgets.
Open source from day one. MIT licensed.

Every other decision got filtered through that list. If something would’ve meant breaking one of those rules, it was off the table. Easier to build something small and clean when the no-list comes first.

What’s in v1

In plain language:

Time in any city. /time-in-tokyo, /time-in-sao-paulo. Live clock, locale-aware (12h AM/PM for English, 24h everywhere else), DST status, the next DST change, links to nearby cities.
City-pair conversion. /tokyo-to-london style URLs. Two side-by-side cards with an interactive time slider and a quick-pick table for common business hours.
Specific-time pages. /9am-tokyo or /9am-tokyo-to-london for natural queries like “what’s 9 AM in Tokyo over here?”.
Six locales. English, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Dutch, Mandarin. The chrome and city names render in the local language; URL slugs stay shared so the site is easier to crawl.

Some numbers, since they’re easy to compare: 2,500 cities, 221 countries, 295 timezones, 6,946 hand-merged translations. All on a Cloudflare D1 database, all SSR’d from Cloudflare Workers at the edge. No origin server to maintain.

The tech, briefly

For anyone curious:

Astro 6 with the Cloudflare adapter, server-side rendered on Workers
Tailwind v4 with @theme tokens
Svelte 5 islands for the interactive bits: search, slider, your-time detection
Cloudflare D1 for the city + translation data
Workers Analytics Engine for privacy-respecting pageview counts (no IPs persisted; daily-rotating salts)
GeoNames for the city dataset (CC BY 4.0)

The whole thing is at github.com/VerburgtJimmy/globaltimeconvert.com. You can clone it and run a copy on your own Cloudflare account in about fifteen minutes.

What’s next

I’ll keep the roadmap to myself for now, but I’ll continue working on this project using the same principles that started it. With that in mind, there are still some exciting things to look forward to.

If you find it useful

The site is at globaltimeconvert.com
Source is at github.com/VerburgtJimmy/globaltimeconvert.com. Issues, suggestions, and PRs all welcome
If it saves you a few seconds and you want to say thanks, there’s a Ko-fi and a GitHub Sponsors page. No tier benefits, no special access, just a “thanks for keeping it running” if it feels worth that to you.

That’s it. It’s meant to be small and boring in the best way. If it works for you, you should barely notice it’s there.

Stay curious,

Jimmy