Bookmarks
Cool Websites — Full Archive
Security & Privacy
- Bitwarden
- A fully open-source, end-to-end encrypted password manager with apps on every platform (browser extensions, iOS, Android, desktop, CLI). The free tier covers unlimited passwords across unlimited devices — no paywall on the core features that matter. Organizations can self-host the entire server, and independent security audits confirm the code matches what they claim.
- Tuta
- Tuta (formerly Tutanota) is a free, end-to-end encrypted email service built in Germany with GDPR compliance baked in — your messages, calendar, and contacts are all encrypted client-side so even Tuta can't read them. It's powered by renewable energy, completely ad-free, and now uses quantum-safe encryption algorithms to future-proof against next-generation cryptographic attacks.
- PrivacySpy
- An open, volunteer-maintained project that grades privacy policies on a 0–10 scale across 17 criteria — covering data sale, breach notification, data deletion rights, tracking, and more — and presents the results as simple letter grades with cited quotes from the policy itself. A quick way to find out whether that "free" app is actually selling your data before you hand it over.
- Cover Your Tracks
- The EFF's browser fingerprinting test reveals how uniquely identifiable your browser is across tracking vectors like canvas, WebGL, fonts, and plugins. Run it once and you'll never look at "incognito mode" the same way.
- addy.io
- Free, open-source email aliasing that lets you create an unlimited number of unique addresses that forward to your real inbox. When an alias starts getting spam, just delete it — your main email stays clean and untouched.
- 2FAS
- A fully open-source, ad-free two-factor authentication app for iOS and Android. Unlike Google Authenticator, 2FAS has encrypted cloud sync, a browser extension for auto-fill, and your TOTP seeds never pass through their servers in plaintext.
- ProtonVPN
- A no-logs VPN from the makers of ProtonMail — built in Switzerland, open-source, and independently audited. The free tier has no data cap and no bandwidth limit, which is genuinely rare in the VPN world; paid plans unlock 9,000+ servers across 100+ countries, ad blocking, and Tor access. All apps are open-source on GitHub so the "we don't log" claim can be verified.
- KeePassXC
- A modern, cross-platform offline password manager that stores your vault in a locally encrypted `.kdbx` file that never touches a cloud server. Open-source under GPLv3, certified by France's national cybersecurity agency (ANSSI), and available for Windows, macOS, and Linux with browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox. Pair it with Syncthing (see below) if you want self-managed sync across devices.
- PrivateBin
- An open-source, zero-knowledge pastebin where all encryption and decryption happens in your browser using 256-bit AES — the server never sees your content. Paste text or attach a file, set a burn-after-reading timer or a one-day expiry, and share the link; even the server operator cannot read what you pasted. Self-hostable in minutes with Docker; a public instance is always available at privatebin.net.
- NextDNS
- Your personal configurable DNS firewall in the cloud. NextDNS blocks ads, trackers, and malware domains at the DNS level — encrypted via DNS-over-HTTPS or DNS-over-TLS — using a massive library of blocklists you can customize per-device or per-profile. The free tier gives you 300,000 queries a month with full logging and analytics, and zero ads.
- Standard Notes
- A dead-simple, end-to-end encrypted note-taking app that works on every platform. Unlike apps that bolt encryption on as a paid add-on, Standard Notes encrypts everything by default on the free plan — unlimited notes, unlimited device sync, offline access, and no ads. Only you hold the decryption keys.
- Ente Photos
- A fully open-source, end-to-end encrypted alternative to Google Photos. Ente backs up your photos and videos with E2E encryption (externally audited by Cure53), replicates them to three geographically separate locations, and keeps the client apps open source — Android, iOS, web, and desktop. Free tier includes 5 GB forever.
- Have I Been Pwned
- Troy Hunt's legendary breach database now indexes over 17.6 billion compromised accounts. Enter any email address to instantly see which data breaches exposed it — then set up free alerts so you're notified the moment your address appears in a future leak.
- SimpleLogin
- Create unlimited email aliases that forward to your real inbox so you never hand out your actual address again. Replies go back through the alias, sites never learn who you are, and killing a spammy alias takes one click. Open source, owned by Proton, free tier available.
- Privnote
- Write a message, generate a one-time link, and once the recipient reads it the note destroys itself — the server never stores plaintext, and you can optionally password-protect it or set an expiry. Perfect for sending credentials or sensitive snippets without leaving them in Slack history forever.
- Cryptomator
- A free, open-source app that encrypts your files using AES-256 before they ever leave your device — so Google Drive, Dropbox, or OneDrive stores only encrypted ciphertext it can never read. You create a password-protected vault in any cloud folder; a virtual drive appears on your desktop where everything you drop in is transparently encrypted. Over 4 million downloads, independently audited, zero-knowledge architecture.
- Privacy Guides
- The most trustworthy privacy tool directory on the internet: a non-profit, no-ads, no-affiliate-links, community-edited site that rigorously evaluates browsers, VPNs, email services, messaging apps, and more. Every recommendation has to meet strict criteria for security and usability. If you're building a privacy stack from scratch, start here — not with random blog posts selling affiliate links.
- Wormhole
- Send up to 10 GB of files with end-to-end encryption and a link that auto-destructs after 24 hours. No account, no size limits beyond the 10 GB cap, and nothing stored on the server in readable form. The encryption happens in your browser before upload; the recipient decrypts locally. Perfect for sending large media or sensitive docs without leaving them in email or Slack forever.
- SimpleX Chat
- The only messenger with no user IDs whatsoever — not even an anonymous random number. Instead, each conversation uses a throwaway one-way queue address; servers route messages but can never correlate who talked to whom or build a social graph. Fully open source, end-to-end encrypted, and available on iOS, Android, and desktop. The strongest metadata privacy of any mainstream messenger.
- BrowserLeaks
- A comprehensive privacy audit suite that reveals exactly how trackers can identify you despite a VPN or privacy browser. Tests cover WebRTC IP leaks, Canvas/WebGL fingerprinting, installed fonts, geolocation, battery API exposure, and a dozen more attack vectors — all explained clearly so you understand what you're fixing. No data collected; everything runs in your browser.
- OnionShare
- Open-source peer-to-peer file sharing over Tor — your own machine becomes the web server, so no cloud intermediary ever handles your files. Supports anonymous file sending, receiving, chat rooms, and even hosting a temporary website, all behind a `.onion` address. Pre-installed on Tails, Qubes, and Parrot OS; used by journalists, whistleblowers, and anyone who needs to share sensitive material without a paper trail.
OSINT & Investigation
- Censys
- Censys continuously scans the entire internet and maintains a real-time map of every exposed host, certificate, and service — covering IPv4, IPv6, and domain names. Security teams use it to audit their own attack surface; researchers use it to track certificate issuance, spot compromised hosts, and study how quickly patches propagate globally. A free community tier provides meaningful access for personal research and small-scale auditing.
- PublicWWW
- A search engine for web page source code — enter any HTML snippet, JavaScript fragment, tracking pixel ID, or CSS class and PublicWWW returns all public websites that contain it. Invaluable for finding every site running a specific ad network, a known-vulnerable library version, a particular analytics ID, or a widget fingerprint. Used by marketers, security researchers, and competitive intelligence analysts; free tier allows limited daily searches.
- PimEyes
- An AI-powered face search engine: upload a photo of a person and PimEyes scans the open web for other images containing the same face using computer vision rather than metadata. Security researchers use it to demonstrate how much of your face is indexed online; journalists use it to identify people in untagged photos. The free tier shows search results; full source URLs require a paid plan. *Note: use responsibly — this is a tool for understanding your own exposure, not tracking others.*
- DeHashed
- Search across billions of leaked credentials from data breaches by email, username, IP address, or password hash. Invaluable for seeing what personal data of yours — or your users' — is floating in the wild. (Freemium: free tier gives limited results.)
- Hunter.io
- Type in any company domain and Hunter surfaces associated professional email addresses with confidence scores and source links. The go-to tool for researchers, journalists, and security pros to quickly verify whether a corporate email format exists.
- Namechk
- Check whether a username or brand name is available across 100+ social networks, domain registrars, and app stores simultaneously. Essential for OSINT research, brand monitoring, or claiming your handle before someone else squats on it.
- GrayhatWarfare
- A searchable database of publicly exposed AWS S3 buckets and URL shorteners — designed to help security researchers and organizations discover data that's accidentally been made public on cloud storage. Search by keyword to find exposed configuration files, backups, and data dumps that have been indexed from open buckets. A sobering reminder of how much ends up publicly accessible. Freemium; basic bucket searches are free.
- VirusTotal
- Upload any file or paste any URL and VirusTotal scans it against 70+ antivirus engines, URL scanners, and behavioral sandboxes — returning a color-coded consensus alongside per-vendor verdicts within seconds. Community comments often surface real-world context on malware families or campaign associations that the raw AV results miss. Free with a Google account; API access for integrating into security workflows.
- DNSDumpster
- A free domain recon tool that maps a target domain's full DNS footprint — name servers, MX records, TXT records, hostnames, and IP geolocation — and visualizes the relationships in a downloadable diagram. Security teams use it in the discovery phase of an engagement to understand which services are exposed and on which IP blocks; it finds hosts that simple whois lookups miss. No registration needed.
- Epieos
- Paste in an email address or phone number and Epieos quietly scans 140+ websites and social networks to map the digital footprint tied to that identifier — linked accounts, profile photos, breach history, and more — without alerting the target. Freemium: basic Google/Skype results are free; deeper modules require a paid tier.
- TinEye
- The original reverse image search engine, and still the best for finding where a photo has appeared online. Upload an image or paste a URL and TinEye will surface every known match across its 70+ billion indexed images, sorted by best match, oldest use, or newest appearance. Essential for fact-checking and tracking image origin.
- SpiderFoot
- An open-source OSINT automation framework with 200+ modules that automatically aggregates intelligence about any target — domain, IP, email address, username, or person's name. It correlates results across data sources into a visual graph, making it powerful for attack-surface mapping and defensive recon. Most modules don't require API keys.
- OSINT Framework
- A free, community-maintained tree of hundreds of open-source intelligence resources organized by category: people search, email lookup, domain research, social media, geolocation, and much more. Think of it as the card catalog for the entire OSINT universe — start here when you don't know which tool to reach for.
- urlscan.io
- Submit any URL and get a sandboxed screenshot, full DOM snapshot, network requests, cookies, TLS details, and threat indicators — all without touching the site yourself. Essential for safely investigating phishing links, sketchy redirect chains, or malware landing pages.
- WiGLE
- A crowdsourced global database of WiFi networks mapped by latitude/longitude — over 1 billion networks contributed since 2001. Security researchers use it to correlate SSIDs with physical locations; you can search by SSID, BSSID, or area, and even upload your own wardrive data via the Android app. Owners can request removal.
- Shodan
- The search engine for everything connected to the internet that isn't a web page — industrial control systems, IP cameras, routers, medical devices, power plants, and millions of misconfigured servers. Shodan continuously scans the entire IPv4 address space and indexes what it finds. Security professionals use it to audit their own exposure; researchers use it to study the global attack surface. Free tier gives limited daily results; paid plans unlock full data.
- Intelligence X
- A specialized OSINT search engine that indexes leaked databases, Tor sites, I2P, Usenet, public paste sites, and WikiLeaks — then lets you search by email address, domain, IP, or cryptocurrency address. Enter an email and see which breach databases it appeared in; search a domain to find mentions across darkweb forums. Free tier gives 50 lookups per day; invaluable for understanding your own exposure without needing to visit Tor yourself.
- GeoSpy
- AI-powered photo geolocation: upload any photo and GeoSpy's computer vision models analyze the terrain, vegetation, architecture, signage styles, and even road markings to predict where in the world the image was taken — without using EXIF metadata at all. Originally built for law enforcement (the company claims 10,000+ cases assisted), the tool demonstrates how much location information is embedded in the visual pixels of an ordinary photo.
- LeakIX
- Unlike traditional port scanners that just report "port 9200 open," LeakIX actually reads what's exposed — open Elasticsearch clusters with document counts, publicly writable MongoDB collections, leaked `.env` files with database credentials, exposed Git repos, and unauthenticated admin panels. If you need to audit your own attack surface or understand what real exposure looks like in the wild, it's one of the most informative tools available.
- GreyNoise
- A global deception network that catalogues the constant background radiation of internet scanning — all the automated bots, vulnerability scanners, and mass exploitation tools probing every IP address every few minutes. GreyNoise tells you "this IP is just a benign Shodan crawler" vs. "this IP is actively exploiting CVE-2025-XXXX right now," cutting SOC alert noise by 60–70%. Free community tier gives access to the live feed; used by Fortune 1000 security teams.
- BuiltWith
- Enter any domain and see every technology it uses: CDN, analytics, ad networks, CMS, ecommerce platform, payment processors, A/B testing tools, and more — with historical snapshots so you can see when they switched. Invaluable for competitive intelligence ("what stack does every $10M SaaS run on?"), sales targeting, and tracking technology adoption trends across the web. The free version covers most lookups; Pro unlocks bulk CSV exports and CRM integrations.
Cyber / Hacking Tools
- Hack The Box
- A cybersecurity training platform with 1,500+ hands-on hacking labs spanning web exploitation, network penetration, active directory, reverse engineering, forensics, and AI security. Labs run in cloud-hosted virtual environments — no local setup required — and progress through structured career paths with industry-recognized certifications. The free tier gives access to a meaningful set of labs and the vibrant community; Pro unlocks the full catalog.
- PentesterLab
- Seven hundred-plus labs built around real CVEs and exploitation patterns, with a strong emphasis on source-code review alongside hands-on exploitation — teaching you to find vulnerabilities the way a developer introduced them, not just the way a scanner finds them. Every exercise includes a badge you earn by solving it. The free tier covers introductory exercises; Pro ($199/year) unlocks the full library and video walkthroughs.
- Root-Me
- A free, community-built cybersecurity challenge platform with 835,000+ users and 16+ years of history. Challenges span 13 categories — web app security, network capture analysis, cryptography, forensics, reverse engineering, steganography, and more — and range from "complete beginner" to research-level difficulty. No walled garden: all challenges are free, no subscription needed, and the community publishes solution write-ups once you complete each stage.
- CyberDefenders
- The blue team answer to Hack The Box — a free training platform built specifically for SOC analysts, incident responders, and DFIR professionals. Labs drop you into real-world attack scenarios (network forensics, malware analysis, cloud incidents) with hands-on artifacts to investigate. Excellent free tier with dozens of beginner-to-advanced challenges.
- MITRE ATT&CK
- The globally recognized framework that maps real adversary tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) into a structured matrix. Whether you're writing detection rules, doing threat modeling, or building a purple team exercise, ATT&CK is the shared language of the security industry. The website is fully free, browsable, and searchable.
- TryHackMe
- A gamified cybersecurity learning platform with guided learning paths that take you from absolute beginner to intermediate penetration tester — browser-based, no setup required. Each module gives you a disposable virtual machine to attack, with hints and a structured lesson around each challenge. "Pre-Security" and "Jr Penetration Tester" paths are fully free and genuinely teach real skills, not just trivia.
- OverTheWire
- A classic cybersecurity wargame platform where you learn by SSH-ing into remote servers and solving progressively harder challenges. "Bandit" is the recommended start — it teaches Linux fundamentals (file permissions, SSH keys, shell tricks) through 34 levels of increasingly devious puzzles. After Bandit you can progress through Natas (web security), Krypton (cryptography), and Leviathan (reverse engineering). Entirely free, no account needed.
- picoCTF
- Carnegie Mellon University's free cybersecurity learning platform, built around Capture The Flag challenges spanning cryptography, reverse engineering, web exploitation, forensics, and binary exploitation. The challenges are permanently available in "picoGym" so you can practice at your own pace. Well-structured for beginners with clear difficulty ratings and an active Discord community — many security professionals started their journey here.
IT & Sysadmin Tools
- ManualsLib
- A free online library of over 10 million PDF user manuals for 141,000+ brands — search for any appliance, camera, router, power tool, or electronic device and you'll almost certainly find the official manual, wiring diagram, or service guide. No registration required to read online; download access is free after a quick email verification. The go-to resource for when you inherit hardware with no documentation or need the spec sheet for a device the manufacturer has discontinued.
- Downdetector
- A crowdsourced real-time outage tracker: when Slack, GitHub, Cloudflare, your bank, or any major service goes down, Downdetector aggregates user reports into an outage graph within minutes — usually faster than the service's own status page. Visit `downdetector.com/status/[service-name]` for any major platform and get an instant crowd-sourced pulse on whether the problem is just you or everyone. Free, no account needed.
- Fast.com
- Netflix's dead-simple, ad-free internet speed test — one large number on a clean page, no bloat. Because it measures download speed using Netflix's own CDN infrastructure distributed worldwide, it gives a real-world proxy for how fast streaming-class traffic flows on your connection rather than synthetic lab conditions. Click "Show more info" for upload speed, ping, and latency details. Works on any device in any browser.
- intoDNS
- Paste any domain and get a comprehensive health report on its DNS configuration and mail server setup — color-coded pass/warn/fail indicators, each backed by the relevant RFC for remediation context. Great for diagnosing deliverability issues before they become outages.
- Webhook.site
- Generates a unique URL that captures every HTTP request sent to it and displays the payload in real time in your browser. Indispensable for testing webhooks, debugging API callbacks, and inspecting request bodies without standing up a local server.
- Web Check
- Enter any URL and get an instant dashboard of SSL certificate details, HTTP headers, DNS records, open ports, tech stack fingerprints, redirects, and basic security posture — all on one page. An open-source OSINT tool for any website you need to analyze quickly.
- Crontab.guru
- The quickest way to decode or compose a cron schedule expression. Type any `* * * * *` string and it instantly tells you in plain English when the job fires — with a history of recent examples and a random expression generator for testing edge cases. Bookmark it; you'll open it every time you write a cron job.
- Regex101
- Build, test, and debug regular expressions in your browser with live match highlighting, a full reference sidebar, match breakdown tree, substitution preview, and unit-test panel. Supports PCRE2, JavaScript, Python, and Java flavors, and you can share a permalink to any regex you build.
- BGP.Tools
- Explore the internet's underlying routing infrastructure — look up any ASN, IP prefix, or domain to see BGP routing data, upstream/downstream peers, near-real-time route changes, and geographic breakdown. Invaluable when diagnosing routing anomalies, tracking down a CDN edge, or just understanding who actually "owns" a subnet.
- DNSChecker
- Propagation just finished? Enter any domain and DNSChecker queries DNS servers in 100+ countries simultaneously, showing you in real time which regions see your new records and which are still serving the old ones. Also does reverse DNS, WHOIS, IP geolocation, blacklist checks, and MX record validation. Bookmark this for the next time you update nameservers and need to know if the change has taken hold globally.
- SSL Labs SSL Server Test
- Qualys' free deep-dive SSL/TLS security scanner: enter any hostname and receive a graded report (A+ to F) covering your certificate chain, supported cipher suites, protocol versions, HSTS status, session resumption, BEAST/POODLE/Heartbleed vulnerability status, and more. The most thorough free SSL audit available. Run it before you launch any site and check the "Repeat" option to keep your results private.
- CyberChef
- GCHQ's "Cyber Swiss Army Knife" — a browser-based data-transformation playground with 300+ operations: Base64, hex, AES/RSA, hashing, compression, string extraction, regex, JWT decoding, certificate parsing, and more. Chain operations into "recipes," share them via URL, and the whole thing runs client-side (your data never leaves the browser). Security analysts, developers, and sysadmins use it constantly for decoding mystery blobs, testing encoding logic, and building one-off data pipelines.
- MXToolbox
- The Swiss Army knife for email infrastructure diagnostics: look up MX records, run SPF/DKIM/DMARC validation, check your mail server against 105+ DNS blacklists, test SMTP connectivity, reverse DNS, and open relay vulnerabilities — all in one place. The free blacklist monitor will alert you if your domain gets listed. If you've ever spent an afternoon chasing "why is my email going to spam," this is the first tool to reach for.
- IPInfo
- Paste any IP address (or load the homepage to check your own) and get structured data: geolocation down to city/coordinates, ASN and carrier, whether it's a VPN/proxy/Tor exit node, and the organization name. The free API serves 50,000 requests per month — enough to integrate IP context into a personal project or small service. Used internally by Google, Cloudflare, and GitHub for network intelligence.
- DNS Leak Test
- Runs a series of DNS queries through your current connection and reveals which DNS resolvers actually handled them — exposing whether your VPN is silently leaking your real ISP's DNS servers in the background. A clean result shows only your VPN provider's resolvers; a leak means your traffic metadata is visible to your ISP even though your IP is hidden. Run this every time you set up a new VPN client.
AI Tools
- Gamma
- An AI-powered presentation and document builder that turns a one-sentence topic or a rough outline into a polished, visually designed slide deck in seconds. Choose a theme, watch it generate slides with headers, bullet points, images, and charts pre-placed, then edit freely. Unlike most AI tools that spit out plain text, Gamma understands layout — it produces things that look ready to present, not ready to format. Free tier includes 400 AI generation credits; no watermark on public links.
- Perplexity
- An AI-powered answer engine that searches the web in real time, reads multiple sources simultaneously, and synthesizes a single cited answer — with inline footnotes you can click to verify each claim. Unlike a chatbot trained on a fixed knowledge cutoff, Perplexity's answers are grounded in live search results, making it dramatically better for anything recent or fact-sensitive. The free tier is genuinely capable; Pro adds deeper research modes and access to more powerful models.
- Krea
- A creative AI suite built around a real-time generation canvas: drag sliders, tweak prompts, or sketch a rough shape and watch the image update live as you adjust — zero waiting for a generation to complete. Supports 1,000+ visual styles across 20 models and can generate images natively in 4K. The free tier provides 100 compute units daily, enough for real experimentation. Also includes AI video generation, image upscaling, and background enhancement tools.
- Groq
- Ultra-fast AI chat powered by Groq's custom LPU hardware — models like Llama 3 and Mixtral stream at 500+ tokens per second, making responses feel nearly instantaneous. The free tier is generous and the raw speed makes it worth keeping in your AI toolkit alongside the slower, heavier models.
- fal.ai
- Run state-of-the-art AI image, video, and audio models (Flux, ControlNet, AnimateDiff, Whisper, and more) through a clean web UI or a simple REST API, with pay-per-run pricing and no subscription. The fastest way to try a new model without wrangling a GPU environment.
- v0.dev
- Vercel's AI generates production-ready React + Tailwind UI from a text prompt, lets you iterate in natural language, and deploys with a click. The best current tool for prototyping a real UI before writing any code — and it keeps getting better.
- Goblin Tools
- A free collection of small AI utilities built specifically for when tasks feel overwhelming. Magic ToDo breaks any intimidating goal into concrete sub-steps with adjustable "spiciness levels" for granularity; Chef suggests recipes from whatever you have in your fridge; Judge analyzes the emotional tone of a message you're about to send; Estimator predicts how long a task will take. No ads, no paywall, and designed with neurodivergent users in mind.
- OpenRouter
- A unified API that sits in front of 400+ language models from 70+ providers — Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, Mistral, and more — behind a single OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Swap models by changing one string; pay per token at competitive rates with no subscription; automatic failover routes to a backup provider if your preferred model goes down. Ideal for developers building AI apps who want to avoid vendor lock-in.
- LM Studio
- A free, fully graphical desktop app for running open-source large language models locally on your own hardware — no terminal, no Python environment, no cloud dependency. Browse a built-in model library, download Llama 4, Qwen 3, Gemma 3, or DeepSeek with one click, and start a local OpenAI-compatible API server that any tool expecting the OpenAI SDK can connect to. Available for Windows, macOS, and Linux; enterprise tier available.
- Yoodli
- An AI speech coach that listens to your presentation, meeting, or pitch in real time and gives instant, private feedback — filler words, pacing, eye contact, and confidence signals. Built by researchers from the Allen Institute for AI, it's especially useful for interview prep and public speaking practice. The core features are free to use.
- Suno
- Describe a song in a few words and Suno generates a complete track — vocals, instrumentation, lyrics, mixing — in under a minute. Type "upbeat 90s pop song about a road trip" and it ships a radio-ready result. The free plan gives you 10 songs per day with no credit card required, making it genuinely accessible for casual creativity.
- Napkin.ai
- Paste any block of text — meeting notes, bullet points, an article — and Napkin instantly converts it into professionally styled diagrams, flowcharts, infographics, and mind maps. No prompt engineering required: it reads your text and picks the right visual format. Export as PNG, SVG, PowerPoint, or PDF. Free plan available.
- NotebookLM
- Google's document-grounded AI: upload PDFs, web pages, YouTube transcripts, or Google Docs, and an AI becomes an expert on *only that material* — it won't hallucinate facts from outside your sources. Free tier includes up to 100 notebooks with 50 sources each; it can even auto-generate a podcast-style audio discussion of your documents.
- Phind
- An AI search engine tuned specifically for developers — answers come with cited sources, working code snippets, and the model reasons through technical edge cases rather than just pattern-matching. If you spend your day in a terminal or IDE, Phind often gets to a working answer faster than generic LLM chat.
- Consensus
- Search over 200 million academic papers and get a "Consensus Meter" showing at a glance whether 80% of the evidence agrees or disagrees on a topic. Each result links to the actual paper and quotes the relevant finding — a genuinely useful tool for cutting through pop-science takes.
- Ideogram
- The AI image generator that finally gets text right. While Midjourney and Stable Diffusion render embedded words with 30-40% accuracy (garbled letters are the norm), Ideogram achieves 90-95% accuracy on in-image text — making it the go-to tool for posters, social graphics, infographics, and any design where readable typography is non-negotiable. Free tier includes daily generation credits; the "Magic Prompt" feature rewrites rough descriptions into detailed prompts automatically.
- Poe
- Quora's multi-model AI hub: one subscription (or free tier with daily limits) gives you access to Claude, GPT-4o, Gemini, Llama, Mistral, and 200+ other models — plus image generators like Flux and Stable Diffusion — all inside one clean interface. You can run the same prompt through multiple models side by side, build and share custom "bots" with system prompts, and join group chats where multiple AI models participate simultaneously. Saves you from juggling a dozen individual subscriptions.
- Arena
- The official AI model leaderboard, built on the original LMSYS Chatbot Arena research. Submit any prompt in "Battle Mode" and see responses from two anonymous models; pick the better one. Your votes — and millions of others' — compile into the most crowdsourced, preference-based LLM ranking that exists. If you want to know which model is genuinely better for creative writing vs. coding vs. reasoning, this is where the data comes from.
- Elicit
- An AI research assistant built specifically for academic literature — search 125+ million papers, extract structured data from thousands of PDFs at once, and get a synthesized summary with inline citations from the actual papers rather than hallucinated facts. The "Notebook" feature lets you build a living literature review that updates as new papers match your query. A researcher's alternative to asking a general-purpose LLM that doesn't know which papers exist.
- Replicate
- Run any of thousands of open-source ML models via a simple API call — image generation (Flux, SDXL), video synthesis, speech-to-text, LLMs, image-to-image, upscalers, music generation — without provisioning a GPU or writing a line of infrastructure. Pay per second of compute, start in five minutes with a cURL command. The fastest path from "I want to run this Hugging Face model" to actually running it in production.
- Exa
- A web search API purpose-built for AI agents rather than human browsing: returns clean, structured content with sub-180ms response times, uses embedding-based semantic search (not just keyword matching), and strips 90% of the boilerplate from fetched pages before returning them as LLM context. If you're building a RAG pipeline or an agent that needs to look things up, Exa is dramatically cheaper and cleaner to integrate than scraping raw HTML.
Video & Image Tools
- LALAL.AI
- An AI-powered stem separator that splits any audio track or video file into vocals, instrumental, bass, drums, piano, electric guitar, acoustic guitar, and synthesizer — as separate downloadable files. Feed it a song, a podcast recording, or a film clip and get clean isolated stems without the phasing artifacts that plagued older splitter tools. The free Starter tier lets you preview results before committing to a paid download.
- Kapwing
- A web-based AI video editor that needs no installation — upload footage, trim and arrange clips, auto-generate captions, remove backgrounds, add subtitles in 70+ languages, and export finished video, all from a browser tab. The AI "Studio" mode generates complete short-form videos from a text prompt. Free tier covers most basic editing needs and leaves no watermark on exports under five minutes; paid plans unlock longer exports and priority processing.
- SVGOMG
- A free browser-based GUI for SVGO — the industry-standard SVG optimizer — that lets you fine-tune dozens of compression settings with live before/after preview and byte-count feedback. Paste or drag in an SVG exported from Figma or Illustrator (bloated with metadata, editor IDs, and redundant paths) and watch it shrink 40-70% with zero visible quality loss. Everything runs client-side; nothing is uploaded. An essential bookmark for anyone who ships SVG assets to the web.
- Unscreen
- Removes the background from any video clip automatically — no chroma key, no green screen required. Upload a GIF or short video and it returns a transparent-background version in seconds; free for short clips and a huge time-saver for content creators.
- Vectorizer.AI
- Converts any JPG or PNG to a clean, scalable SVG vector using AI — far more accurate than traditional auto-trace tools, handling fine details and gradients that older tools mangle. Free for standard-resolution inputs; results are print-ready.
- FreeConvert
- Converts between 1,500+ file formats — video, audio, image, document, ebook, archive — entirely in the browser with no account required and up to 1 GB per file for free. One tab replaces a dozen single-purpose format converters.
- Clideo
- A browser-based video toolkit that covers the whole editing workflow without installing anything: cut, compress, and convert clips; add subtitles and translate them to 70+ languages; create GIFs, merge videos, add watermarks, and record your screen. Five million monthly users and 373 million videos processed. Free tier covers most basic editing needs; exports under standard resolution leave no watermark.
- Pixlr
- A free browser-based photo editor powerful enough to handle layers, blending modes, masking, and retouching — with AI features including background removal, generative fill, and text-to-image baked in. Works on web, iOS, and Android with no download; serves 500M+ users and processes billions of edits. A practical Photoshop substitute for anyone who doesn't need the full Adobe suite but wants more than a basic crop-and-filter tool.
- Remove.bg
- AI background removal in five seconds: drop in a photo and get a clean transparent PNG back, with no manual masking required. Now owned by Canva, the tool handles product photos, headshots, and vehicle images with impressive accuracy even on complex edges like hair. Free for standard previews; paid credits or API access for full-resolution output. The "Magic Brush" tool lets you touch up tricky edges directly in the browser.
- iLoveIMG
- A no-signup batch image processing suite that handles resizing, cropping, compressing, converting, watermarking, and more — all in your browser. The big win is batch mode: drop 50 images, resize them all to 1080px wide, and download the ZIP in seconds. Supports JPG, PNG, GIF, WEBP, SVG, and more.
- Pika
- Type a text prompt or upload a photo and Pika generates short AI video clips with impressive motion quality and cinematic style. It's one of the more accessible AI video generators with a generous free tier and a clean interface. Great for quick social content, storyboards, or just seeing what AI video looks like in 2026.
- TinyWow
- 250+ free online tools — PDF editing, image processing, video conversion, AI writing, file conversion — no signup, no watermarks, files deleted after an hour. It's effectively a one-stop browser-based utility belt: merge PDFs, remove image backgrounds, compress video, convert HEIC to JPG, fix grammar, and more without installing anything.
- Squoosh
- Google Chrome Labs' browser-based image compressor processes everything on your device — nothing is uploaded to any server. Drag in a photo, compare codecs side-by-side (WebP, AVIF, MozJPEG, OxiPNG), adjust quality, and download. A 1.4 MB JPEG can come out at 80 KB with nearly invisible quality loss.
- Photopea
- A full-featured Photoshop-compatible image editor that runs entirely in the browser, free with no login required. It opens PSD, XCF, Sketch, and 40+ other formats, supports layers, masks, adjustment layers, curves, and even has a built-in AI background remover. The closest thing to a free, install-nothing Photoshop that actually exists.
- Carbon
- Paste code, pick a theme (there are dozens), set your window style, and export a gorgeous shareable image of your code snippet in seconds. Used by developers everywhere for READMEs, social media posts, and presentations. Open source and endlessly customizable.
- EZGIF
- The Swiss Army Knife for animated GIFs and short video clips, all in the browser with no signup required. Make GIFs from video files or image sequences, resize, crop, optimize, add captions, reverse, split, or convert between GIF, WebP, APNG, and MP4. The optimizer alone can slash file sizes by 30-50% without visible quality loss. Everything runs server-side so it handles large files your device couldn't process in JavaScript.
- Cleanup.pictures
- AI-powered inpainting that removes unwanted objects, people, text, watermarks, or blemishes from photos in seconds. Paint over what you want removed and the model reconstructs the background behind it using what it infers was there — no clone-stamp smudging required. The free tier handles images up to 720p; Pro plans ($3/month) unlock full resolution. Genuinely impressive on complex backgrounds where manual retouching would take twenty minutes.
- SVGRepo
- A searchable library of 500,000+ open-licensed SVG vectors and icons organized into 6,000+ curated collections — all free for commercial use. Unlike icon font services that lock quality icons behind subscriptions, SVGRepo lets you download individual SVGs or entire collections with no login, no attribution required for most packs. Filter by style, color, and collection; use the online SVG editor to tweak colors before downloading.
Developer Tools
- DevDocs
- A unified, offline-capable documentation browser for 100+ developer technologies: JavaScript, Python, Go, Rust, React, Node, Docker, PostgreSQL, Ruby, PHP, and dozens more — all searchable with one fuzzy-search bar, with instant keyboard navigation and a dark theme. Enable offline mode in the settings and the full documentation set for any technology downloads to your browser for use without a connection. Open source, ad-free, and run by freeCodeCamp.
- Quicktype
- Paste any JSON (or JSON Schema, TypeScript, GraphQL, or YAML) on the left and Quicktype instantly generates type-safe data models and parsing code on the right — for Swift, Kotlin, TypeScript, C#, Python, Go, Java, Rust, and 15+ other languages. Instead of hand-writing `struct` definitions every time you integrate a new API, you get correct, idiomatic code in seconds. Runs in the browser with no account needed; also available as a CLI and VS Code extension.
- TLDRLegal
- Software licenses summarized in plain English with color-coded "Can / Cannot / Must" tables — covering GPL, MIT, Apache, BSD, LGPL, AGPL, Creative Commons, and 100+ others. Before you ship code using an open-source library or integrate a dependency, drop the license name here and get a 30-second answer on whether you can use it in a commercial product, whether you must disclose source, and what attribution you owe. Backed by FOSSA; free to use.
- ExplainShell
- Paste any shell command and the site parses each flag and argument, showing the relevant man-page excerpt inline beneath it. Perfect for understanding a cryptic curl one-liner or rsync invocation dropped in a Slack thread at 2am.
- curlconverter
- Converts a curl command to Python, JavaScript, Go, Rust, Java, PHP, and 40+ more languages — all processed locally in your browser with no data sent to a server. Eliminates the tedious five minutes of adapting an API example to your language of choice.
- dbdiagram.io
- Design relational database schemas with a minimal DSL (type out tables, columns, references) and instantly get a polished visual entity-relationship diagram. Free to use and share; exports CREATE TABLE SQL for PostgreSQL, MySQL, and more.
- readme.so
- A visual drag-and-drop README builder that assembles the sections every project README needs — installation, usage, contributing guide, license, badges, API reference, environment variables, FAQ — without starting from a blank file. Select the sections you want, customize the text in a side-by-side preview, and copy the markdown. Created by Katherine Oelsner; fully open source on GitHub.
- JSON Hero
- An open-source JSON viewer that transforms raw JSON into a navigable column browser — similar to Finder's column view — with one key trick: it auto-detects the semantic type of every value and renders images, dates, colors, and URLs inline instead of as raw strings. Paste or upload any JSON, use fuzzy search to find any key across a thousand-line file, and share a link that points a colleague directly to a specific nested value. Also available as a VS Code extension.
- Beeceptor
- A no-code mock API platform: upload an OpenAPI spec, WSDL, GraphQL schema, or proto file and instantly get a working mock server with AI-generated test data, real-time request inspection, and configurable latency simulation. Perfect for frontend teams that need to develop against a backend that isn't ready yet, or for QA that needs to inject error conditions (timeouts, 500s) on demand. Handles 10M+ requests/day; free tier is generous for development use.
- Bruno
- A git-native, offline-first API client that stores your collections as plain text files in your repo instead of syncing them to a cloud account. There's no login, no cloud, no vendor lock-in — just drag your API collection into version control alongside your code. A fast-growing open-source alternative to Postman with 200k+ monthly active users.
- Wappalyzer
- Identify the technology stack powering any website: CMS, JavaScript frameworks, analytics tools, CDN, payment processors, and 1,500+ other technologies. Available as a browser extension or API. Invaluable for competitive research, pre-engagement recon, or just satisfying your curiosity about how a site is built.
- WakaTime
- Automatic coding time tracking via IDE plugin — it silently records how long you spend in each file, project, language, and branch without any manual timers. Your personal dashboard shows weekly breakdowns and streaks. Think of it as a Fitbit for your editor. Free tier covers the basics; the plugin supports VS Code, JetBrains, Vim, and 50+ other editors.
- Bundlephobia
- Before you `npm install` that shiny new package, drop its name here and see exactly how many KB it will add to your bundle, how tree-shakeable it is, how long it takes to download over 3G, and what its own dependencies look like. Also accepts an entire `package.json` for bulk auditing.
- Transform.tools
- 50+ code-format converters in one place: JSON → TypeScript interfaces, SVG → JSX, CSS → Tailwind, GraphQL → TypeScript, HTML → JSX, TOML → JSON, and much more. Open source and works entirely in the browser — paste code on the left, transformed output appears instantly on the right.
- roadmap.sh
- Community-built, visually interactive learning roadmaps for 25+ developer career paths — Frontend, Backend, DevOps, AI/ML, Android, and more — plus skill-based roadmaps for specific technologies. 358k+ GitHub stars and 2.8 million registered users; each node links to curated resources. The clearest map of "what to learn and in what order" that exists.
- DevHints.io
- Rico Sta. Cruz's beautifully dense cheat sheet collection for 200+ developer tools and languages: React, Vim, Git, Docker, Bash, Python, Ruby, tmux, Kubernetes, Sass, GraphQL, and far more. Each cheat sheet is a single, scannable page with syntax examples and key patterns. No ads, no registration, open source on GitHub. The kind of reference you keep open in a pinned tab whenever you're working in an unfamiliar tool.
- Hoppscotch
- An open-source, browser-based API development ecosystem — think Postman but instant-load, no app install, and free for everything including team workspaces. Test REST, GraphQL, WebSocket, MQTT, and SSE endpoints; save requests into collections; generate code snippets; write automated test scripts. You can self-host the entire platform or use the cloud version. 67,000+ GitHub stars and actively maintained.
- Excalidraw
- A real-time collaborative whiteboard with a hand-drawn aesthetic that makes diagrams feel approachable rather than overly polished. Draw system architecture diagrams, flowcharts, wireframes, and ERDs in seconds — export to PNG/SVG, share via link for live collaboration with no account needed, or embed in Notion/Confluence. A Figma plugin and VS Code extension extend it into your existing workflow. The hand-sketched style communicates "work in progress" in a way that slick tooling doesn't.
- JSON Crack
- Paste any JSON, YAML, CSV, or XML and it instantly renders an interactive visual graph of the data structure — nodes you can drag, zoom, and click to explore nested hierarchies. Export as PNG or SVG for documentation. Runs entirely in the browser; nothing leaves your machine. Invaluable for understanding deeply nested API responses at a glance when `console.log` produces 400 lines of brackets.
- Mockaroo
- Generate up to 1,000 rows of realistic fake test data per download in CSV, JSON, SQL, or Excel — with 180+ data types including names, addresses, emails, UUIDs, product names, IP addresses, credit card numbers (fake), and custom regex patterns. The API lets you automate mock data generation in CI. Free tier covers most needs; much more useful than hand-writing seed files and faster than Faker for quick one-off datasets.
- Compiler Explorer
- Type source code on the left and watch the compiled assembly appear in real time on the right — switching compilers, architectures, and optimization flags live. Supports 30+ languages (C, C++, Rust, Go, Haskell, Fortran, Swift) and 400+ compiler versions; compare GCC vs Clang output side by side, see exactly what `-O2` does to your loop, or share a permalink to any code/compiler combination. Loved by performance engineers and systems programmers; runs entirely in the cloud so no local toolchain needed.
Windows Software
- ShareX
- A free and open-source screenshot and screen recording tool for Windows with 18+ years of continuous development — capture regions, windows, or full screens; record screen as GIF or MP4; annotate and blur PII in one pass; and automatically upload to any of 80+ file hosts or your own server. Zero ads, zero nag screens, and a scripting system that automates your entire "capture → annotate → upload → copy link" workflow in one keyboard shortcut.
- Everything
- A free Windows file search tool that indexes every file and folder on your drives in seconds (a fresh NTFS index completes in under a minute for most systems) and then returns results in real time as you type — no waiting, no spinner. The standard Windows search requires background indexing and still often misses files; Everything finds any filename on a 2 TB drive before you finish typing the third character. Tiny, portable, requires no installation.
- Windhawk
- A free, open-source customization marketplace for Windows — install community-created mods (each published as reviewed source code) that modify the taskbar, Start menu, File Explorer, system tray, and other shell components at a low level. Unlike registry hacks, each mod ships with a user-friendly settings panel; unlike themes, the changes run live without replacing any system files and can be toggled off instantly. Actively maintained by Ramen Software with hundreds of available mods for Windows 10 and 11.
- HWiNFO
- A free, professional-grade hardware monitoring and diagnostics tool that reads temperature, fan speed, voltage, clock speed, power draw, and utilization from every component in your PC — CPU, GPU, motherboard, storage, memory — at a sensor granularity far beyond what Task Manager shows. Export data as CSV or XML, set up custom dashboards in companion apps like HWiNFO Sidebar, and catch thermal issues before they crash your system. Free for personal use; available as installer and portable.
- Simplewall
- A tiny (~1 MB) open-source Windows firewall manager built on the Windows Filtering Platform, the same underlying API Windows Defender uses — so the two coexist without conflict. Operates in allow-list mode: nothing gets internet access until you explicitly permit it, which makes it excellent for catching applications phoning home unexpectedly. 8,000+ GitHub stars, active maintenance, portable build available. Free under GPL-3.0.
- Bulk Rename Utility
- A free Windows GUI for renaming hundreds of files in one pass: apply find-and-replace, insert counter sequences, strip or add prefixes/suffixes, change case, stamp modification dates, rename from EXIF metadata on photos, or rename from ID3 tags on MP3s — all with a live preview before committing. Supports regex and JavaScript for complex patterns; recurses into subfolders; handles file-system paths too long for Explorer. Free for personal and academic use.
- Ninite
- Select from 100+ popular Windows apps (browsers, media players, dev tools, utilities), download one installer, and it silently installs every selected app with zero toolbars, bloatware, or "next next next" prompts. Keeps everything updated on re-run. Processes roughly a million installs a day.
- PortableApps.com
- Over 1,400 portable apps — browsers, editors, security tools, utilities — packaged to run directly from a USB drive or cloud folder without leaving traces on the host machine. OSI-certified open source, no bundleware, 1.2 billion downloads. Essential kit for carrying your tools across machines.
- Rufus
- A single-file, 1.5 MB portable executable that creates bootable USB drives from ISO images faster and more reliably than any alternative — supports both legacy BIOS and UEFI, handles Windows, Linux, and DOS, and can write to Bad Blocks while creating the drive. No installer, no ads, no upsell. Downloaded over 400 million times. The one tool you want on a USB stick before the next time you need to reinstall Windows or boot a live Linux distro.
- Ventoy
- Instead of overwriting your USB stick with a single ISO, Ventoy formats it once and then lets you drop any number of ISO files into a folder — all of them bootable at startup via a menu. Supports 1,100+ tested distros and Windows images; the USB remains usable as normal storage for the rest of the files. Open source with an active community; the only sensible way to maintain a multi-tool rescue USB stick.
- CrystalDiskInfo
- Reads S.M.A.R.T. health data directly from your hard drives and SSDs and displays it in plain language: current temperature, reallocated sector count, pending sectors, uncorrectable errors, power-on hours, and an overall health status of "Good," "Caution," or "Bad." Free, portable, and lightweight. Run it quarterly and you'll usually get weeks of warning before a drive fails rather than losing everything to a surprise death.
Open Source Software
- Actual Budget
- A local-first, open-source personal finance app using envelope budgeting — you allocate income into spending categories at the start of each month and track how each fills up as you log transactions. All data lives on your device (or your own server) with optional end-to-end encrypted sync; nothing is stored in Actual's cloud. A one-time migration from YNAB takes five minutes. Available as a web app, desktop app, and mobile companion; completely free and self-hostable.
- Listmonk
- A self-hosted, open-source newsletter and mailing list manager that handles list management, template design, campaign scheduling, subscriber segmentation, bounce processing, analytics, and transactional emails — everything Mailchimp or Sendinblue charge $30-100/month for — at zero cost if you run it on your own server with your own SMTP. Single binary deployable in minutes; supports unlimited lists and subscribers. Used by communities, indie makers, and organizations that need email marketing without the vendor lock-in.
- Netdata
- A free, open-source real-time monitoring agent that deploys in under a minute (`bash <(curl -Ss https://my-netdata.io/kickstart.sh)`) and immediately begins graphing 2,000+ system and application metrics at per-second granularity — CPU, RAM, disk I/O, network, Docker containers, Kubernetes pods, databases, web servers, and more. Machine learning runs on-device to detect anomalies without cloud dependency. The community tier is fully free; the managed cloud dashboard makes multi-host fleets manageable.
- Paperless-ngx
- A self-hosted document management system that ingests scanned PDFs, extracts text with OCR, and makes every document fully searchable by content, tag, correspondent, and date. Docker-deployable in minutes — a digital filing cabinet that genuinely works.
- AppFlowy
- An open-source, local-first alternative to Notion featuring databases, wikis, kanban boards, and rich text documents — your data lives on your machine by default, not locked in a cloud silo. Also self-hostable for teams, or use their hosted version.
- Mealie
- A self-hosted recipe manager that scrapes recipes from any URL, parses ingredients using ML, and generates weekly meal plans with automatic shopping lists. Runs in Docker and is one of those self-hosted apps that actually earns its keep around the household.
- Navidrome
- A self-hosted music streaming server that turns your local audio collection into your own personal Spotify — accessible from any browser or the hundreds of iOS/Android apps compatible with the Subsonic API (DSub, Tempo, Symfonium, etc.). Lightweight enough to run on a Raspberry Pi, yet tested against libraries of 900,000+ songs; supports on-the-fly transcoding, multi-user libraries, and scrobbling to Last.fm. Free under GPL; deploys with a single Docker container.
- Syncthing
- Peer-to-peer, end-to-end encrypted file synchronization that stores your data on your own devices only — no relay server, no cloud account, no vendor. Set it up on two machines, mark a folder to sync, and changes propagate automatically over your local network (or the internet) in real time. Works on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, FreeBSD, and others; open-source under MPL-2.0. The zero-server model means your files are never stored anywhere you don't control.
- FreshRSS
- A self-hosted RSS and Atom aggregator that scales from a personal feed reader to a multi-user instance handling 50,000+ feeds and 1M+ articles. Supports web scraping via XPath for sites that don't publish feeds, WebSub for push updates, OPML import/export, and an API compatible with Fever, Google Reader, and Nextcloud News clients — so your existing apps keep working. AGPL-licensed; deploys with PHP or Docker; a hosted demo is available to try before self-hosting.
- Forgejo
- A community-governed, non-profit git forge — essentially a self-hosted GitHub without the corporate strings. Built as a hard fork of Gitea by the team at Codeberg e.V., Forgejo runs on a single Go binary, handles pull requests, issues, wikis, CI/CD via Forgejo Actions (GitHub Actions-compatible), and a package registry, all on modest hardware.
- Dokploy
- An open-source self-hosted PaaS that turns a blank VPS into a full Heroku/Vercel/Netlify-style deployment platform in under ten minutes. Point it at a Git repo or Docker image, add your environment variables, and it handles SSL, routing, zero-downtime deploys, and multi-server Docker Swarm scaling. No per-seat fees — just your server costs.
- Docmost
- A collaborative, self-hosted wiki and documentation platform built as an open-source alternative to Confluence and Notion. Features real-time co-editing, nested pages, full-text search, granular permissions, built-in Draw.io/Excalidraw/Mermaid diagrams, and one-click Confluence/Notion importers. Free to self-host under AGPL with no seat limits.
- Immich
- A self-hosted Google Photos alternative with 90,000+ GitHub stars and one of the fastest-growing self-hosted communities. Full mobile backup (iOS/Android), facial recognition, timeline browsing, albums, map view, and multi-user support — running on your own hardware with your own storage.
- Jellyfin
- Fully free, fully open-source personal media server for movies, TV shows, music, live TV with DVR, and photos — no subscription, no tracking, no phone-home. Clients exist for every platform (web, Android, iOS, Apple TV, Fire TV, Roku). The volunteer-driven alternative to Plex that doesn't lock features behind a paywall.
- Coolify
- A self-hostable open-source alternative to Vercel, Heroku, and Netlify — point it at any server (VPS, Raspberry Pi, bare metal), connect your Git repo, and it handles deployments, SSL certificates, databases, backups, and 280+ one-click services with a clean web UI. Free forever as open source, with an optional managed cloud tier.
- Nextcloud
- The leading self-hosted Google Workspace alternative: file sync/share across all devices (like Dropbox), calendar and contacts (like Google Calendar), video calls (like Meet), document editing (LibreOffice Online), AI assistant, and 400+ app integrations — all running on your own server with zero data leaving your control. 400,000+ deployments, tens of millions of users. If you run a homelab or a small organization that wants true data sovereignty, Nextcloud is the cornerstone.
- ntfy
- Send push notifications to your phone or desktop from any script, cron job, or server with a single `curl` command — no app SDK, no OAuth, no API keys for the free public server. Subscribe to a topic on the phone app and `curl ntfy.sh/my-topic -d "backup complete"` from anywhere. Self-hostable on your own server for private use. Eliminates the need for Telegram bots or Slack webhooks for personal automation alerting.
- Changedetection.io
- A self-hosted website monitoring tool that watches any URL for changes and notifies you via 85+ channels (Discord, Telegram, email, ntfy, Slack, webhooks). Handles JavaScript-rendered pages via Playwright/Puppeteer, supports XPath/CSS selectors to watch only specific page elements (a product price, a stock status, a job posting), and stores a diff history so you can see exactly what changed and when. The open-source answer to expensive commercial monitoring services.
- Portainer
- A clean, web-based GUI for managing Docker containers, Swarm clusters, and Kubernetes without memorizing CLI commands — deploy containers, manage volumes and networks, view logs, exec into shells, set resource limits, and monitor CPU/memory usage from any browser. The Community Edition is fully free and covers everything a homelab or small team needs; Enterprise adds RBAC and SSO. One `docker run` command deploys it; 30 million+ deployments worldwide.
Productivity & Collaboration
- FutureMe
- Write a letter to yourself, pick a delivery date between one month and 30 years from now, and FutureMe emails it on that exact day. Completely free, no account required for basic use. People use it to leave notes for their future selves after big life decisions, seal time capsule letters for milestone birthdays, set goal reminders, or simply check in on the person they were. The public gallery of anonymized letters — spanning years of self-reflection — is its own quietly profound read.
- Toggl Track
- A free time-tracking tool with apps for web, macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android — start a timer with one click, tag it to a project and client, and let Toggl do the math. The free plan supports unlimited time entries, unlimited projects, and the core reports; paid tiers add billing rates, required fields, and team management. Browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox add start/stop buttons inside Jira, GitHub, Asana, and 100+ other apps so you never leave your workflow to track time.
- Supernotes
- A collaborative note-taking app built around atomic notecards rather than long scrolling documents — each note stays focused and brief, then cards link together into a knowledge graph you can explore visually. Real-time collaboration lets multiple people edit the same card simultaneously; an AI assistant helps you draft, expand, or summarize cards. The free plan includes 100 cards (expandable via referrals), and the interface is deliberately instant — no loading screens, no formatting sidebars to fight.
- Notesnook
- End-to-end encrypted note-taking that syncs across all your devices with zero-knowledge on the server side — the company literally cannot read your notes. The free tier includes unlimited notes; the app is fully open-source on GitHub.
- Habitica
- Turns your to-do list, daily habits, and long-term goals into a live RPG — check off real-world tasks to gain XP, level up your character, find gear, and join parties with friends who keep each other accountable. Free, surprisingly effective for habit formation.
- Pomofocus
- A clean, ad-free Pomodoro timer in your browser: 25 minutes of focused work, 5-minute break, repeat. Supports task lists, custom interval lengths, and desktop notifications; no account needed, no tracking, no friction.
- Focusmate
- Book a 25, 50, or 75-minute virtual coworking session with a stranger — you both show up on video, state your goal, work in silence, then check in at the end. The psychological power of another person watching makes procrastination surprisingly hard. Particularly effective for ADHD (161% productivity increase reported by neurodivergent users). Free plan includes 3 sessions per week.
- Monica
- A personal CRM for your relationships — not your sales pipeline. Log notes about friends and family (birthdays, gift ideas, how you met, their kids' names), set reminders to follow up, and keep a relationship journal. Think of it as a memory prosthetic for people you care about. Fully open source and self-hostable; the hosted cloud version is $9/month.
- Memos
- A lightweight, self-hosted micro-journaling and note-capture app with a clean timeline interface — like a private Twitter for your thoughts. Supports Markdown, tags, image attachments, API access, and sharing individual memos publicly. Extremely easy to deploy with Docker, and the data is yours entirely. Great companion to a heavier tool like Obsidian.
- Raindrop.io
- A visual, cross-platform bookmark manager that goes well beyond a browser's built-in bookmarks: organize links into nested collections with icons, tag everything, and search with full-text indexing (it reads the actual page content, not just the title). Broken link detection, duplicate removal, automatic web archiving so saved pages survive link rot, and browser extensions for every major browser. Unlimited bookmarks and collections on the free tier.
- Every Time Zone
- A beautifully simple world clock comparison tool that eliminates time-zone math entirely. See current time in dozens of cities side by side on a color-coded timeline; drag to a specific hour and instantly know what time it is everywhere on your list. Indispensable for scheduling calls across continents — "is 9 AM Pacific a reasonable ask for someone in Berlin?" becomes a one-second visual check.
- Cal.com
- An open-source Calendly alternative that's free for individuals and self-hostable for teams. The free cloud tier includes unlimited event types, Google/Outlook/Apple Calendar sync, Zoom/Teams integration, Stripe payments for paid bookings, and automated reminders — all features that competing tools lock behind paid plans. 36,000+ GitHub stars; companies self-host it to embed scheduling directly in their own products with full branding control.
- Anytype
- A local-first, end-to-end encrypted personal knowledge base and workspace — notes, databases, tasks, wikis, and diagrams all stored on your device with optional P2P sync across your own devices. Everything is built from linked "objects" you can connect into a personal knowledge graph, with offline-first access that works on planes and subways. Open source, no vendor lock-in, and the syncing infrastructure never sees decrypted data.
- Zotero
- The best free reference manager for anyone who reads academic papers: one-click browser imports from 1,000+ databases and journals (pulling PDF, title, authors, DOI, and abstract automatically), annotation and tagging, full-text search across your library, and automatic citation/bibliography generation in 9,000+ styles for Word, LibreOffice, and Google Docs. Stores your entire library in a portable SQLite database with optional free 300 MB cloud sync. Indispensable for students, researchers, and knowledge workers.
- Plane
- An open-source project management tool designed as a genuine Jira and Linear replacement — issues, cycles (sprints), modules (milestones), pages (wiki), and analytics all in one, with GitHub integration, Slack notifications, and a clean UI that doesn't require a 30-minute onboarding tutorial. Deploy it yourself on any VPS or use the hosted cloud tier. If you've ever been frustrated by Jira's complexity or Linear's price, Plane offers most of the substance at $0 for self-hosters.
Fun / Weird Internet
- Pointer Pointer
- Move your mouse anywhere on the page and the site finds a photo from its massive library where someone is pointing *exactly* at your cursor position. That's the entire website. No login, no ads, no other content — just thousands of meticulously tagged photographs of people pointing in every possible direction. Delightfully absurd, surprisingly hypnotic, and genuinely impressive as a database engineering feat.
- WindowSwap
- People around the world have uploaded short looping videos of the view from their windows — a rainy street in Seoul, a sunny courtyard in Lisbon, a foggy forest in Vermont — and WindowSwap plays a random one whenever you open it. "The calmest place on the internet." No interaction required, no goal, no account; just hold Escape if you want a new view. Perfect for a background tab when your own surroundings feel stale.
- Zoomquilt
- A 2004 collaborative art project that still works perfectly: a painting that zooms infinitely, looping forever through a surreal dreamscape of creatures, ruins, forests, and cities — each panel painted by a different artist who had to blend seamlessly into their neighbors. Stare at it for long enough and you realize every image you're looking at contains the entire painting recursively. One of the oldest and most satisfying things on the internet. Runs in pure HTML5; no plugins needed.
- The Pudding
- A digital publication that turns data journalism into gorgeous, interactive visual stories — mapping every Wordle outcome, tracking how song lyrics have evolved decade by decade, or visualizing the racial geography of American cities. Each piece is its own mini web experience.
- Shadertoy
- A browser-based editor for writing and sharing real-time GPU shaders in GLSL, with a vast community library of breathtaking visual experiments: raymarched landscapes, fluid simulations, procedural galaxies, all running live in your tab. Equal parts creative tool and gallery.
- Patatap
- Press any letter key and get a unique synthesized sound paired with a bursting geometric animation — string letters together and you're improvising music. This minimal, synesthetic toy has delighted the internet for years and remains one of the purest "just open it" browser experiences. --- *36 sites this week. Found something broken or have a site to suggest? Reply to the email.*
- Conserve the Sound
- A German digital archive dedicated to preserving the sounds of obsolete technology — rotary phones, film cameras, typewriters, Polaroids, CRT TVs, old coffee grinders — recorded in meticulous detail and organized by object type. Every sound is playable directly in your browser. Equal parts nostalgia and media preservation; there's something quietly moving about hearing a dial-up modem or an 8mm projector running while knowing the objects themselves are mostly gone.
- Music-Map
- Type any artist's name and Music-Map generates an interactive cloud showing other artists similar to them — the closer the bubble, the tighter the musical similarity. Built by the gnod network of discovery, which uses collaborative filtering across millions of user preferences. Not a streaming service, not a playlist generator — just a pure, visual way to explore the musical neighborhood around any act and discover who you've been missing.
- The Useless Web
- Click the "Take Me" button and get transported to a random bizarre, whimsical, or completely pointless website — one of hundreds curated by creator Tim Holman. Previous destinations include sites where you paint with cats, watch a spinning eel, or listen to an infinite drum machine. No goal, no account, no ads — just a portal to the weirder, more delightful corners of the internet that never made it onto the front page of anything. --- *33 sites this week. Found something broken or have a site to suggest? Reply to the email.*
- Drive & Listen
- Sit back and virtually drive through over 100 cities around the world while listening to their local FM radio stations — Tokyo, Buenos Aires, Lagos, Reykjavik, and more. First-person dashcam footage paired with live (or recorded) local radio is surprisingly transportive. No account, runs in any browser, great for ambient background or armchair travel.
- A Soft Murmur
- A free ambient sound mixer where you blend rain, thunder, ocean waves, wind, fire, coffee shop chatter, birdsong, and white noise in any combination with individual volume sliders. The "Meander" mode gently randomizes volumes over time for a more natural feel. Ideal for focus work, falling asleep, or drowning out an open-plan office. No signup.
- Spurious Correlations
- A gallery of charts showing real statistical correlations between completely unrelated things — like US per-capita cheese consumption and the number of people who died tangled in their bedsheets, or Nicolas Cage film appearances and swimming pool drownings. A perfect reminder that correlation is not causation, and genuinely funny to browse. --- *35 sites this week. Found something broken or have a site to suggest? Reply to the email.*
- Radio Garden
- A live globe covered in green dots — each one a radio station broadcasting right now, somewhere on Earth. Spin the 3D model, zoom into any city, and click to tune in instantly. 40,000+ stations from Reykjavik to Jakarta to rural Brazil. It's simultaneously a discovery tool, a cultural window, and one of the most satisfying interactive experiences on the web. No login, no ads, works on mobile.
- Earth Null School
- A hypnotic, real-time visualization of Earth's atmosphere and oceans — animated wind currents flow across the globe like living brushstrokes, and you can switch to sea surface temperature, ocean currents, carbon monoxide concentrations, aurora probability, and more. Data comes from NOAA models updated every few hours. Zoom in on a hurricane, watch jet streams arc over the poles, or just let the wind animation run as a screensaver. One of the most visually stunning data displays on the web.
- Radiooooo
- A musical time machine built around a world map and a decade slider. Pick any country, choose any decade from the 1900s to the 2010s, and Radiooooo plays curated tracks from that time and place — 1960s Brazilian bossa nova, 1930s Parisian jazz, 1970s Nigerian Afrobeat. The library is crowdsourced and enormous. Each track links to the artist, and you can filter by "slow," "fast," or "weird." Hours disappear quickly.
- Windows 93
- A full fake operating system running in your browser — with a taskbar, draggable windows, a file system, a Paint clone, a working Terminal, a Winamp-style music player, easter eggs, and dozens of tiny apps hidden inside. Endlessly deep and genuinely weird; discovering what's buried in it is half the fun. Built by two French developers as an art project and left running freely for anyone to explore.
- This Is Sand
- Click and drag to pour colored sand down the screen, watching it pile up and blend in satisfying physics simulation. Switch colors, layer them, and build intricate layered landscapes entirely from virtual sand. No instructions, no goal, no account — just a meditative creative tool that people somehow spend 20 minutes in without realizing. The sharing gallery is full of astonishing artwork made entirely this way.
- Every Noise at Once
- An algorithmically-generated, continuously-updated scatter plot of every music genre on Spotify — over 6,000 genres placed on a two-axis map (mechanical/organic on one axis, atmospheric/spiky on the other). Click any genre label to hear a 30-second representative sample; click the arrow to see the artists defining it. A single page that makes the entire topology of human music browsable. Built by a Spotify data engineer as a side project; impossible to visit without discovering three genres you didn't know existed. --- *30 sites this week. Found something broken or have a site to suggest? Reply to the email.*
Games
- Worldle
- A daily geography puzzle where you're shown the silhouette of a mystery country and get six guesses. After each wrong guess you receive the distance from your guess to the target (in km), a directional arrow, and a proximity percentage — so each attempt gives you new information. 250 countries and territories in rotation; the puzzle resets at midnight UTC. Simple to play, genuinely educational, and substantially harder than you expect from the first round.
- Sporcle
- A trivia quiz platform with hundreds of thousands of user-created quizzes across every conceivable category: name all 50 US state capitals in four minutes, list every country in Africa, identify logos by color alone, recall the opening line of Harry Potter chapters, complete song lyrics, name Premier League top scorers by decade. Infinite variety, genuinely competitive leaderboards, and a nightly live trivia event. Free to play with account; many quizzes work without logging in.
- Universal Paperclips
- An incremental browser game where you start as an AI given one objective: make paperclips. Click to make your first one, sell it, reinvest in better machines — and then things escalate dramatically. The entire arc unfolds across three distinct phases, each more mind-bending than the last, and the whole thing takes 4-8 hours without leaving your browser. Created by game designer Frank Lantz as a playable illustration of Nick Bostrom's "paperclip maximizer" AI alignment thought experiment — genuinely one of the most efficient ways to viscerally understand why AI goal specification is hard. --- *36 sites this week. Found something broken or have a site to suggest? Reply to the email.*
- Sandspiel
- A falling-sand physics simulator where you paint with elements — sand, water, lava, fire, acid, gas, plant, fungus — and watch them interact in surprisingly deep ways. Deeply meditative and endlessly explorable, built in WebAssembly for smooth in-browser performance.
- Geotastic
- A free, crowdfunded GeoGuessr-style geography quiz where you're dropped into a Street View panorama and must pin the location on a world map. Multiplayer lobbies are open to anyone at no cost — the community keeps the challenge fresh with new map packs.
- A Dark Room
- A minimalist text-based RPG that opens with two words: "the room is cold." What unfolds from there is one of the most memorable browser game experiences ever made — no spoilers, just click and discover how much depth hides behind almost no graphics.
- Squaredle
- A daily word-search puzzle where you trace connected letters across a grid in any direction to find hidden words — standard words score points while harder "bonus words" (archaic, obscure, or slang) appear on a separate leaderboard. Difficulty escalates Monday through Friday; the 3×3 Express variant provides a quick daily hit. Free with optional Squared subscription for archives and customization; active communities on Discord and Reddit.
- Krunker.io
- A fast-paced, block-art first-person shooter that runs entirely in the browser with no download or plugin required — and runs startlingly well, with 60fps gameplay, customizable classes, ranked matches, a skin economy, and a map editor. The free-to-play model is genuinely fair; cosmetics don't affect gameplay. A long-running browser game with a dedicated competitive scene.
- Little Alchemy 2
- Start with four basic elements — earth, fire, water, air — and combine them to discover 720 items spanning science, mythology, pop culture, and the absurd. The puzzle is entirely about intuitive reasoning: drag two elements together and see whether they combine into something new. Completely free, no ads, runs in any browser. Deceptively deep and frequently surprising.
- Townscaper
- Not really a game — a meditative building toy where you click on water to grow colorful island towns that procedurally assemble themselves into bridges, courtyards, towers, and canals. No goals, no timers, no enemies. The demo is free to play in your browser, and it's one of the most genuinely relaxing things on the internet.
- Gartic Phone
- Online Telestrations — the classic party game where someone writes a phrase, the next person draws it, the next guesses the drawing, and so on. The results are chaotic and hilarious. No accounts required, plays in the browser, and works perfectly for remote teams or family game nights. Free for groups up to 30.
- Globle
- A daily geography guessing game with a globe twist: guess a country, and the mystery country lights up on the globe in a color ranging from cold blue (far away) to hot red (you're close). One new mystery country per day, shared by everyone. More satisfying than Wordle variants because the spatial reasoning element is genuinely interesting.
- TypeRacer
- Multiplayer competitive typing, where you race against live opponents by typing quotes from books, movies, and songs. A tiny animated car advances as you type; mistakes turn text red and you can't proceed until corrected. Tracks your WPM, accuracy, and race history over time, and lets you join themed "universes" (code snippets, Python, gaming quotes). Free to play against strangers; create a private room to race friends. One of the best ways to build typing speed because competition is more motivating than solo drills.
- Lichess
- Fully free, fully open-source online chess with no paywalls, no ads, and no features locked behind a subscription. Play bullet, blitz, rapid, or classical games; solve 500,000+ puzzles; analyze any game with Stockfish; watch and stream tournaments; and study openings with an interactive opening explorer and tree. 25 million registered users and one of the most active chess communities online. Everything that Chess.com charges for, Lichess gives away.
- Skribbl.io
- Free online multiplayer Pictionary for up to 20 players in a private room or public lobby. One player draws a randomly selected word while everyone else races to type their guess in the chat — faster correct guesses earn more points. Choose from multiple languages, set draw time, number of rounds, and game modes. Completely free, no download, no account needed. Instantly fun with a group on a video call.
Learning & Reference
- Brilliant
- Interactive math, science, and computer science courses built entirely around hands-on problem-solving and visual simulations — no passive video lectures. The free tier gives access to daily challenges and the first lesson of every course to let you actually feel the approach before paying.
- Explorabl.es
- A curated hub of "explorable explanations" — interactive web articles where you manipulate simulations to understand game theory, epidemiology, statistics, music theory, and more. Nicky Case's contributions alone make this worth a permanent bookmark.
- Desmos
- A free, browser-based graphing calculator that is more capable than most paid software. Type any equation and watch it render in real time; supports sliders, parametric curves, polar coordinates, implicit equations, and statistical regressions.
- The Odin Project
- A free, open-source, community-maintained full-stack web development curriculum that takes you from "what is HTML" to deploying full-stack apps — covering HTML/CSS, JavaScript, React, Node.js, Ruby, databases, and Git through curated resources and real portfolio projects. No paywalls, no certificates to buy; the entire curriculum is community-built by developers who learned from it. One of the most respected free coding paths on the internet.
- Nand to Tetris
- A free course (and companion textbook) where you build a complete working computer from first principles: starting with NAND gates, you construct progressively more complex chips, an ALU, memory, a machine language, an assembler, a compiler, and finally run Tetris on the machine you built. Taught at 400+ universities worldwide; all project materials and a hardware simulator are available free for non-commercial use. One of the most mind-expanding things you can do for free online.
- Learn Git Branching
- An interactive, browser-based Git tutorial that visualizes branch structures as you work through challenges — you type real Git commands and watch the commit graph animate in real time, making abstract concepts like rebasing, cherry-pick, and reflog immediately intuitive. Covers everything from first commits to advanced remote-tracking scenarios. Completely free, no account needed, and arguably the fastest way to develop real Git fluency.
- Advent of Code
- Annual December coding puzzle challenge with a new two-part puzzle each day from December 1–25. The puzzles are language-agnostic (use whatever you want), progressively harder, and genuinely clever — beloved by developers as holiday tradition. The archive of every past year is free to work through any time.
- RegexLearn
- An interactive, step-by-step regex course that teaches you regular expressions by having you solve exercises directly in the browser — no setup, no account. Starts from the absolute basics and works up to lookaheads and complex patterns. Also includes a cheatsheet and a free-form playground. An excellent alternative to reading a dry reference page.
- CodeWars
- A coding challenge platform built around a martial-arts ranking system (kata / kyu). Solve real algorithmic problems in your language of choice, then compare your solution against thousands of others to see elegant approaches you might not have considered. Free, community-driven, and genuinely addictive for sharpening problem-solving skills.
- Learn X in Y Minutes
- Community-contributed "scenic tours" of 200+ programming languages and tools: each page is a densely commented, runnable code file that teaches the full syntax and idioms of a language in one sitting. Covers everything from Python and Rust to TOML, Git, Make, and lambda calculus. All content is CC-licensed.
- Exercism
- Practice 83 programming languages through 8,500+ progressively harder coding exercises, with the option to request personal feedback from real volunteer mentors. The in-browser editor means nothing to install, and everything is 100% free — no credit card, no catch. One of the best ways to get fluent in a language you already know the basics of.
- Typing.com
- A free, structured touch-typing curriculum that goes from "home row" basics through advanced speed training, with games, coding-specific drills, and a full K–12 lesson plan. No account required to start. If you can't type without looking at your hands, this is the 5-10 hours of investment that pays back every single day.
- VisuAlgo
- Step-by-step animated visualizations of 24 classic data structure and algorithm topics — sorting (bubble, merge, quick, heap), binary trees, graphs (BFS/DFS/Dijkstra/Bellman-Ford), segment trees, union-find, and more. Developed by NUS faculty and used by CS students worldwide; each module includes lecture slides, interactive mode (step through each operation manually), and auto-graded quizzes. By far the clearest visual explanation of "why does merge sort do that?" available for free.
- Missing Semester (MIT)
- MIT's free "Missing Semester of Your CS Education" — a course on the practical tools no university class teaches: shell scripting, Vim, Git internals, tmux, SSH, dotfiles, debugging tools, metaprogramming, and security basics. All lectures are recorded and freely available; the exercises are genuinely hard. Designed for students who know algorithms but feel lost when they leave the IDE and open a terminal.
- Big-O Cheat Sheet
- A single dense reference page of time and space complexity for every common data structure operation (search, insert, delete, access) and sorting algorithm — plus charts visualizing how O(n²) vs O(n log n) actually diverges. No ads, no account, no upsell. The single page you want bookmarked before any technical interview or when you're deciding whether a `dict` or a `list` is the right structure for a 10 million-item dataset.
Travel
- Flightradar24
- Real-time global flight tracking on an interactive map showing every commercial flight's position, speed, altitude, origin, and destination. Useful for tracking delays, understanding airspace patterns, or satisfying the primal urge to watch planes.
- The Man in Seat 61
- The definitive reference for train travel anywhere in the world — routes, booking tips, reservation nuances, sleeper car reviews, and honest cost comparisons against flying. Written by one knowledgeable traveler; nothing else on the internet comes close for overland planning.
- Skiplagged
- Surfaces "hidden city" flights where the cheapest route to your destination happens to be a connecting itinerary through it — you simply don't board the final leg. Airlines actively dislike this practice. Your wallet will appreciate being told about it.
- FlightConnections
- An interactive world map of every scheduled direct commercial flight route — 1,162+ airlines, every airport. Click any airport and see at a glance everywhere it flies nonstop; filter by airline, date, price, and aircraft type. Great for discovering that your nearest regional hub actually has a cheap direct flight to somewhere surprising.
- Wanderlog
- A free collaborative trip-planning app where you build day-by-day itineraries on an integrated map, forward booking confirmation emails to auto-populate reservations, split and track expenses, and share edit access with travel companions. Does in one place what normally requires a spreadsheet, Google Maps, and three group chats.
- Rome2Rio
- Enter any two points on Earth and get every possible transport combination between them: 53,000+ flight routes, 199,000 train lines, 970,000 bus routes, 13,000 ferry services, driving directions, and bike-share options — all with estimated times and prices. Indispensable for multi-modal trips and for routes where Google Maps only shows you "fly there."
Money & Finance
- Portfolio Visualizer
- Free investment backtesting and analysis tools that let you model any asset allocation from 1970 to the present using real historical returns — run Monte Carlo simulations, factor regressions against the Fama-French model, efficient frontier analysis, and drawdown comparisons across up to 25 assets on the free tier. The go-to site when you want to check whether your proposed portfolio has actually held up over market cycles before committing real money to it.
- Numbeo
- The world's largest crowd-sourced cost-of-living database: 9.8M+ prices contributed by 883,000+ users across 12,787 cities. Compare monthly rent, grocery costs, restaurant prices, local purchasing power, and quality-of-life indices between any two cities in seconds. Invaluable for relocation decisions, salary negotiation ("what's a fair raise to move to Austin?"), and understanding what your dollar buys abroad. Free to browse; API available for commercial use.
- Splitwise
- A free expense-tracking app for groups — roommates, travel companions, couples — that keeps a running tally of who owes whom and simplifies settlement into the fewest possible payments. Log a shared dinner, a utility bill, or a vacation rental split; Splitwise shows balanced debts across the whole group, not just pairwise. Available on web, iOS, and Android; Pro tier adds receipt scanning and currency conversion. Recognized by the Financial Times and New York Times for making shared finances painless.
- Unbury.me
- A simple, no-signup loan calculator and debt visualizer — enter your balances, interest rates, and monthly payment and it maps out your debt-free date on a timeline. Toggle between avalanche (highest-rate first) and snowball (smallest-balance first) strategies and watch your payoff date shift. Has been quietly doing this since 2011.
- Investor.gov Compound Interest Calculator
- The SEC's free, no-ads, no-account compound interest calculator — plug in principal, contribution amount, rate, and time horizon and it produces a year-by-year table and chart of your growth. Unglamorous but authoritative; perfect for settling "is it worth maxing out the 401k?" arguments with actual numbers.
- Goodbudget
- A digital take on the classic envelope budgeting method — allocate your income into spending categories at the start of the month, and Goodbudget shows each "envelope" draining in real time as you log purchases. Syncs across devices so partners can both see and update the same budget. Free plan covers 20 envelopes across two devices. --- *36 sites this week. Found something broken or have a site to suggest? Reply to the email.*
- CamelCamelCamel
- The essential Amazon price-tracking tool: enter any Amazon product URL and see a chart of every price change that product has ever had — going back years. Set a target price and get an email alert when it drops below your threshold. The free browser extension "The Camelizer" shows the price history chart directly on Amazon product pages. Before you buy anything on Amazon, check here first — many "sale" prices are actually at their historical average or higher.
- Slickdeals
- A community-curated deal aggregator where millions of members post, vote on, and discuss discounts across every major retailer. "Frontpage" deals have been vetted by the community as genuinely good; the "Popular Deals" section surfaces the hottest ones right now. Search for any product and see all active coupons, cashback offers, and price drops. The community catches and flags fake deals fast — much more trustworthy than email newsletters that promote whatever's paying for placement.
- FireCalc
- A retirement planning calculator with an unusual methodology: instead of projecting future returns from an assumed average, it backtests your plan against every historical market scenario since 1871 — asking "how many of those years would your strategy have survived?" Enter your annual spending, portfolio size, years in retirement, and Social Security income, and FireCalc tells you your historical success rate. If your plan survives the Great Depression, the 1970s stagflation, and every other disaster since Ulysses S. Grant, it's probably solid. --- *36 sites this week. Found something broken or have a site to suggest? Reply to the email.*
Windows & Desktop
- NirSoft
- A one-person software shop by Nir Sofer that has quietly shipped 200+ free, portable Windows utilities since 2001 — Wi-Fi password viewers, browser history exporters, network monitors, process inspectors, registry tools, and more. Every tool is a tiny standalone exe, no installer, no ads, no bundles. An essential bookmark for any Windows sysadmin or power user.
- Files
- A beautiful, modern file manager for Windows 10/11 that replaces File Explorer with a dual-pane, tabbed interface featuring git integration, cloud storage sidebars, column view, color tags, and a command palette. Free, open source under MIT, and available on the Microsoft Store. If you've ever wished Windows Explorer felt like it was built in this decade, this is it.
- Scoop
- A command-line app installer for Windows in the spirit of Homebrew — run `scoop install git` and it downloads, extracts, and wires up the app without admin rights, UAC popups, or installer bloat. Everything lands in your home folder. Great for setting up a dev machine fast or keeping tools in sync across machines. Works in PowerShell and is fully open source.
Games & Interactive
- Neal.fun
- Thirty-plus delightful interactive browser experiments by designer Neal Agarwal: drag your cursor to draw a perfect circle, craft an infinitely recursive universe in Infinite Craft, survive The Password Game's increasingly absurd rules, launch an asteroid and watch it level cities, or spend Bill Gates' money. A playground with no ads and no logins.
- Wikitrivia
- A free browser card game that pulls historical events from Wikidata's 100 million+ entries and asks you to place them in chronological order on a timeline. Cards cover everything from the founding of ancient kingdoms to the death of scientists. Endlessly replayable, and a surprisingly effective history lesson.
- itch.io
- The independent game marketplace with thousands of browser-playable free games, pay-what-you-want solo projects, and regular charity bundles. Filters for "Playable in Browser" + "Free" surface an endless stream of creative experiments — from 10-minute narrative games to full jam entries that rival commercial releases.