226 picks · 14 lists

The tools we do not build

We host a few hundred small utilities. For everything else there is usually something better than anything we would ship, so these are the ones worth knowing about, sorted by the job you are trying to do. Each entry says what it costs and when to pick it over the obvious alternative.

🎬 AI Video Tools 17 Generators that make video from a text prompt, avatar tools that put a talking head on screen, and editors that cut a long recording down to something watchable. Picked for people who actually have to ship a video this week. 🎧 AI Audio Tools 17 Music generators, voice synthesis, transcription engines and repair tools for bad recordings. Grouped by what you are trying to do rather than by which lab built the model. ✍️ AI Writing Tools 15 Assistants for drafting, editing and translating. Includes the general chat models people write with every day plus the specialists that beat them at one narrow job. 🖼️ AI Image Tools 16 Image generators, upscalers and the open source stacks you can run yourself. Each entry says where the model is strong, because they are much less interchangeable than the marketing suggests. 🤖 AI Coding Tools 16 Agents, editors and autocomplete for people who write software. Split between terminal agents that take a whole task, IDEs that pair with you, and prompt-to-app builders for prototypes. 🔬 AI Research Tools 15 Literature search, citation mapping and reading tools for students, academics and anyone who has to defend where a claim came from. Several are free for individuals. 📐 Diagram and Whiteboard Tools 15 Ways to get an idea out of your head and onto a canvas: AI generators, text-to-diagram languages that live in version control, and whiteboards for working with other people. 🧪 Google Labs and Experiments 15 The useful corner of Google that most people never find: research previews, free notebooks, teaching tools and public data sets. Almost everything here is free with a Google account. 🕵️ OSINT and Investigation Tools 17 Open source intelligence tools used by journalists, security teams and researchers to work with public information: infrastructure scanning, breach data, archives and link analysis. 🔐 Privacy and Security Tools 17 Practical software for keeping your messages, passwords, files and browsing to yourself. Most of it is free, and the paid options are cheap compared to the alternative. 🎨 Design Tools 17 Interface design, motion, 3D and the asset libraries that keep a project moving: colour, type, photography and icons. Weighted toward tools with a real free tier. 🛠️ Developer Tools 19 Editors, terminals, API clients, databases and hosting. The set of things a small team actually needs to get something on the internet without hiring an operations department. ⚡ Productivity Tools 15 Notes, tasks, calendars, launchers and reading tools. Chosen for people who want to stop maintaining a system and get back to the work it was supposed to support. 📚 Free Learning Resources 15 Courses, curricula and practice platforms that cost nothing and are taught well. Everything here is genuinely free to learn from, with no course you have to buy to finish.

Need one of the small things instead?

QR codes, background removal, PDF merging, image resizing and a few hundred more. Those we host ourselves, and most are free.

Browse our tools →