Frequently Asked Questions

Go to jsonhero.dev, paste your JSON into the editor, and click "Format". Your JSON will be pretty-printed with proper indentation and syntax highlighting. You can also load JSON from a URL or upload a file.

Yes. The editor is free with no sign-up required and no ads. Formatting, minifying, validating, searching, editing, downloading and sharing all work on the free plan, and nothing that is free today will become paid. There is also an optional Pro subscription for people who need larger shared documents, control over how long a link lives, and saved collections.

Pro raises the share limit from 100 KB to 1 MB per document, lets you choose how long a link lives instead of the fixed 7 days, adds saved collections so you can name, edit and delete your shares, and raises the daily share limit. It costs ₹99 a month or ₹999 a year in India, and $4.99 a month or $49 a year elsewhere. See Pricing for the full comparison, and the Cancellation & Refund Policy for how cancelling works.

By default your JSON stays on your device. Formatting, minifying, validating, searching, folding, unescaping and downloading are all done by JavaScript in your browser, and none of that JSON is sent to us. Sharing is the exception: when you click Share, the contents of the editor are uploaded to our servers so the link has something to serve, and they are deleted automatically after 7 days. If you never click Share, your JSON never leaves your device.

Clicking Share uploads the text in the editor and gives you a link such as jsonhero.dev/s/AbC123XyZ0. We store the JSON in a private storage bucket, along with its size, a checksum, a short preview snippet, an auto-generated summary such as JSON object · 3 keys, any name you add, a view count, and a salted hash of your IP address used only for rate limiting. No account is needed, so a share is not tied to an identity. Everything is deleted 7 days after upload.

Anyone who has the link. Share links are not password protected; their only protection is a random 10-character id that is effectively unguessable. We never list share links in our sitemap, but we do not block search engines from them either, so a link posted somewhere public can be crawled and indexed. Treat a share link as sensitive, and don't share credentials, access tokens, or personal data through one.

Yes. When you paste a share link into Slack, X, Discord or anything else that unfurls links, the preview card shows the start of your JSON — roughly the first 180 characters as the description, plus an image rendered from the opening of the document. That's deliberate, so people can see what they're about to open, but it does mean a snippet of your data is visible to everyone who can see that message.

A share stays live for 7 days from the moment you create it. After that the link reports "Share expired", a daily cleanup job deletes the stored JSON and its rendered preview image, and the id is retired so it's never handed out again. There is no self-serve delete yet — if you need a share taken down sooner, email hello@jsonhero.dev.

Yes — 100 KB (102,400 bytes) of UTF-8 text per share. Larger documents still format, search and download normally in the browser; they just can't be shared by link. There's also a limit of 30 new share links per hour and 100 per day from one IP address.

Yes. Click the "Minify" button in the toolbar or press Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+M to compact your JSON to a single line, removing all whitespace. This is useful for reducing payload size.

Yes. When you click "Format", JSON Hero validates your input using JSON.parse. If the JSON is invalid, it shows a warning toast and provides best-effort formatting using a tolerant parser so you can still see and fix the structure.

Yes. Click "Load JSON" in the toolbar, enter any public URL in the URL field, and click "Fetch". JSON Hero will download the JSON from that endpoint and display it in the editor. This is great for inspecting API responses.

JSON Hero works in all modern browsers including Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, and Microsoft Edge. It requires JavaScript to be enabled.

Yes. Use the search bar in the toolbar to find text within your JSON document. Matches are highlighted in yellow, and you can navigate between them with the Next/Previous buttons or by pressing Enter. The match counter shows your position in the results.

Click the fold arrow (▶) next to any object or array to collapse it. The collapsed section shows a placeholder like {...} or [...]. Use the "Collapse all" and "Expand all" toolbar buttons to fold or unfold the entire document at once.

Yes. If you paste a JSON string that contains escaped characters (like \"), JSON Hero detects this and offers an "Unescape" button. Clicking it unescapes and re-formats the nested JSON so you can view it properly.

Yes. JSON Hero supports several keyboard shortcuts: Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+M to minify, Enter to jump to the next search match, Cmd/Ctrl+Enter for the previous match, and standard text editing shortcuts in the editor.