About

What gets on the list

A directory that tries to be useful before it tries to make money.

What is this?

A list of 383 free websites, sorted into 47 categories. 108 of them are tools you use to get something done, like editing a PDF or pulling the background out of a photo. The other 67 are places worth going to look at something good, like film archives and museum collections. All of it is free to use.

What does "checked" mean?

Before a site goes on the list, we open it and confirm it's the thing it claims to be. That sounds like a low bar. One list of 50 gave us 4 we could use.

What does that catch?

Dead products, mostly. It also catches links that point at the wrong company. One list we mined offered a site as a ChatGPT alternative, and it turned out to be a real estate brokerage. Another offered a Gemini alternative that was somebody's personal homepage. Both of those loaded fine, so anything that only checked for a working page would have let them through.

Where does the list come from?

Public "useful websites" lists and bookmark exports. We treat those as names to look up, not links to copy over. The hit rate is low. One list of 50 gave us 4 we could use. A file of 449 bookmarks gave us 37.

Do you make money from this?

Not right now. No link on this site is paid for, which is why the counter on the front page says zero. If we sign up for an affiliate program later, those links get labeled on the row itself, and this page will say so before the first one goes live.

Can I pay to get listed?

No. Sites are ordered alphabetically inside each category, so there's no top spot to sell. If a paid link ever appears, it'll be on something that was already listed on its own merits, and it'll be marked.

Some of these sites look sketchy.

5 entries sit in a real legal gray area. They're marked on the row with a note saying why. They're here because they're part of how people actually use the web, not because we're recommending them. Those 5 earn nothing, and that's enforced in the site's code, not just promised here.

How do I find something fast?

Press the / key to jump to the search box, then type the task rather than a product name. Searching "remove background" finds the right tools even though none of them use that exact phrase. Arrow keys move down the results, and your search stays in the address bar so you can send it to someone.

Something here is broken.

Probably. Sites go down, get bought, and disappear behind paywalls all the time, and we check each site before it goes on the list, not continuously. Two entries are already marked Archived for that reason. There's nowhere to report it yet. The contact page will have an address once it's set up.