50 Free Websites Every Founder, Developer and Student Should Bookmark

Every founder I know pays for software they could get free. Every developer I hire has a browser bookmark bar that looks like a graveyard. And every student who writes to me asking how to “get into tech” is usually one good link away from the resource they need.

So here is the list I actually use — fifty free websites, sorted into five categories, that quietly do the work of a paid subscription. Some of these I open every week running Gsoft; some I hand to junior engineers on their first day; a few I discovered from the community on X and kept because they earned their place.

No affiliate links. No “premium” catch. Bookmark the ones you need and share the rest.

1. Research and learning

1. unpaywall.org — A browser extension that finds the free, legal version of paywalled research papers. Essential if you’re reading AI or fintech papers without a university login.
2. openlibrary.org — Borrow digitised books from the Internet Archive’s library. Millions of titles, no card required.
3. doaj.org — The Directory of Open Access Journals. Peer-reviewed research you can read in full, across every field.
4. gutenberg.org — 70,000+ public-domain books. The classics, free, in every format.
5. openstax.org — Free, peer-reviewed university textbooks. If you’re teaching yourself statistics or economics, start here.
6. openculture.com — A curated index of free online courses, audiobooks and lectures from real universities.
7. wolframalpha.com — A computational engine, not a search engine. Type a maths, physics or finance problem and get the worked answer.
8. elicit.org — An AI research assistant that reads papers for you and extracts findings into a table. I use it to survey a field before a client engagement.
9. consensus.app — Ask a question, get an answer backed by peer-reviewed sources with citations. The antidote to “I read it somewhere.”
10. semanticscholar.org — An AI-powered academic search engine that surfaces the most-cited work on any topic.

2. Design and images

11. photopea.com — A full Photoshop clone in the browser that opens PSD files. Our designers use it on machines that don’t have Adobe.
12. squoosh.app — Google’s image compressor. Every image on this site went through it; Core Web Vitals thank you.
13. remove.bg — Remove an image background in one click. Product photos, headshots, logos.
14. cleanup.pictures — Paint over an object in a photo and it disappears. Uncannily good.
15. unscreen.com — remove.bg, but for video.
16. shots.so — Drop a screenshot, get a polished device mockup for your landing page or App Store listing.
17. mediamodifier.com — Thousands of mockup templates — packaging, apparel, print, devices.
18. carbon.now.sh — Turn a code snippet into a beautiful image for a tweet or a slide.
19. ray.so — Same idea as Carbon, with cleaner presets. Pick whichever matches your brand.
20. excalidraw.com — Hand-drawn-style diagrams and whiteboards. Every system architecture diagram I send a client starts here.

3. Developer tools

21. phind.com — An AI search engine tuned for programming questions, with sources. Faster than digging through Stack Overflow.
22. regex101.com — Build and debug regular expressions with a live explanation of every token. Non-negotiable.
23. codebeautify.org — Format, minify and convert almost any code or data format.
24. jsonformatter.org — Paste ugly JSON, get readable JSON, catch the missing comma.
25. explainshell.com — Paste a terminal command and it explains every flag. Give this to every junior on day one.
26. dbdiagram.io — Write a schema in plain text, get an entity-relationship diagram. We use it in every discovery week.
27. connectedpapers.com — A visual map of how research papers cite each other. Great for going from one paper to the ten that matter.
28. scispace.com — Highlight any paragraph of a paper and ask the AI to explain it.
29. alternativeto.net — Find free or open-source alternatives to any software. Ask it before you pay for anything.
30. similarsites.com — Find websites similar to one you already like. Useful for competitor research.

4. Privacy and utilities

31. haveibeenpwned.com — Enter your email and see every data breach it appeared in. Then change those passwords.
32. virustotal.com — Scan a file or URL against 70+ antivirus engines before you open it. Do this with every “invoice.pdf” from an unknown sender.
33. privnote.com — Send a note that self-destructs after it’s read. How we share temporary credentials with clients.
34. file.io — Upload a file, get a link that expires after one download.
35. downdetector.com — When a service is misbehaving, check here first before blaming your own code.
36. tineye.com — Reverse image search. Find where an image came from, or whether your logo is being used elsewhere.
37. fast.com — Netflix’s speed test. No ads, one number.
38. archive.org — The Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine. See what any website looked like in 2009.
39. archive.ph — Take a permanent snapshot of a web page as it is right now. Evidence, receipts, citations.
40. raindrop.io — A bookmark manager that actually works across devices. This whole list lives in it.

5. Media, music and files

41. radio.garden — Spin a globe and listen to live radio from any city on Earth.
42. music-map.com — Type an artist, see a map of similar artists.
43. tunefind.com — Find the song playing in that film or series episode.
44. musicforprogramming.net — Long, ambient mixes built for deep work.
45. mynoise.net — Custom background soundscapes you can tune. Rain, café, engine room.
46. coffitivity.com — Café ambience for people who work better with a hum around them.
47. justwatch.com — Which streaming service has the film you want, in your country.
48. summarize.tech — Paste a YouTube link, get an AI summary with timestamps. Saves an hour a week.
49. smallpdf.com — Compress, convert, sign and edit PDFs.
50. ilovepdf.com — Merge, split, rotate and convert PDFs. Between this and Smallpdf you never need Acrobat.

How to actually use a list like this

Lists like this get saved and forgotten. Three things that make the difference:

• Bookmark by category, not by tool. Put the five categories above into a folder each in raindrop.io. When you need “the thing that removes backgrounds,” you look in Design, not in a 50-item pile.
• Give the developer tools to your team. regex101, explainshell, dbdiagram and jsonformatter should be in every junior’s onboarding document. They compound.
• Check haveibeenpwned.com today. Not later. Today.

A note for founders

The reason I keep a list like this isn’t frugality. It’s discipline: knowing exactly which tools solve which problems is the same skill as knowing which features your product needs and which it doesn’t. The founders I work with who build good software are the ones who are ruthless about tooling — free or paid.

If you’re building a product and want that kind of discipline inside your engineering team — architecture, tooling, hiring, the AI features that are worth shipping and the ones that aren’t — that’s the work I do as a fractional CTO alongside running Gsoft. Book a 30-minute call; I’ll tell you honestly whether you need one.

Know a free tool that belongs on this list? Tell me on LinkedIn — I update it.