Free stuff

7 proven steps to choosing the right software for your team

The full selection process as a 15-page whitepaper. Ten criteria to define before you talk to a vendor, both comparison tables, the diligence checklist, and the one-page approval summary.

AI Skills Library

Ready-to-run Claude and ChatGPT skills for the work community professionals actually do, built from research, not guesswork: a research-backed collection covering moderation, onboarding, events, reporting, content, and membership across the full range of community types from brand and customer communities to nonprofits and local groups.

Animata

156+ animated React components you can copy into any project. Free, open source, and ready to use.

AuthoredUp LinkedIn Text Formatter

This tool formats LinkedIn posts with bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, bullet points, numbered lists, and emojis. Unlike Typefully, Typegrow and Poper, it previews the post as you edit. It is free and needs no signup.

Best Free Font Libraries and Inspiration for Designers

A curated directory of free font libraries, pairing tools, and type inspiration sites, sorted into categories like foundries and identification tools. Updated regularly with new releases.

Brandfetch

Brandfetch stores logos, colors, fonts, and descriptions for millions of companies. You search a brand name or a URL and download its assets, or you call the API to pull the same data into an app. Searching is free, and the API has paid tiers.

coolshapes

coolshapes gives you more than 100 abstract shapes with grainy gradients. You download a shape as SVG or PNG, grab the Figma file, or install the React package. Everything is open source under the MIT license.

CSS HDR Gradients

Hands-down my favorite tool for getiting the just-right CSS for the gradient you want.

Design.dev

A collection of free CSS generators and code tools, from box shadows to gradients, plus AI prompt templates for common UI components. Good for quick front-end utility work.

Doc Detective

Doc Detective tests your documentation to make sure every command, example, and instruction still works, so your users don’t get stuck.

Figma tools

Free tools and plugins Figma has built or curated for designers, covering prototyping, icons, and other productivity utilities. Usable inside Figma or as standalone tools.

Flameshot

A free, open-source screenshot tool with built-in annotation: arrows, text, highlights and blur. Runs on Linux, Windows and macOS.

Font Awesome

Originally I didn't plan on adding more icon resources - until I discovered this cool make-your-own-icon tool that Font Awesome offers. Enjoy! The easiest way to get icons on your website is with a Kit. It's your very own custom version of Font Awesome, all bundled up with only the icons, tools, and settings you need.

Free Dashboard Icons & Logos

A free library of service and app logos built for dashboards, so you're not hunting down individual brand assets one at a time. Icons are for identification only, not endorsement.

Free transcriptions

Online audio & video transcription service. Subtitle generation and translation in 100+ languages. Options for pro subs but also very nice no-need-to-login free tools.

Free Vector Icons — icons.download

275 free vector icons across 16 styles, cleared for personal and commercial use. A quick source when you need a small, consistent icon set.

Free Web Scraping Tools | WebScraping.AI

A set of free browser-based scraping utilities, including a selector tester, curl converter, and API request builder. No sign-up needed for the free tools.

Gifox

A macOS app that records your screen straight to GIF. The free tier caps recordings at 10 seconds and adds a watermark. Pro is a one-time purchase.

GoFullPage

A Chrome extension that captures a full scrolling web page in one click. Free; Premium adds editing, annotation and PDF export.

Google Reader

Listen to the audio of your text Audio player with limited features Text to speech downloads limited to around 5 minutes of audio Highlight text location up to three times

Gradient Hub: colors and tools

Free gradient backgrounds, AI-generated textures, and design tools. Includes Text Gradient Generator, 600+ Gradient Palette, Multi-Color Gradients & Tailwind Palette—all free for commercial use!

Greenshot

A free, open-source screenshot tool for Windows with annotation, highlighting and blur. Sends captures straight to Office apps, Jira, Confluence and other destinations. A paid macOS version is on the App Store.

GSAP

GSAP is a JavaScript animation library for websites. You install it and write code to animate elements, scroll effects, SVG, and text. Webflow now pays for it, so all plugins are free.

GTM Skills

An open library of almost 400 go-to-market agent skills written by practitioners, covering prospecting, ABM, outreach, ads, SEO, AEO, pricing and RevOps. Search by outcome, author or company.

Haikei

Haikei generates SVG background shapes. You pick a generator such as waves, blobs, or blurry gradients, adjust the settings, then download an SVG or PNG. It runs in the browser with no signup.

Headline Studio

Headline Studio scores your headlines and suggests better versions. You type a headline and it rates the wording, length, and word balance for blogs, email, video, and social posts. You need an account, and SEO and AI features cost money.

HTML to Markdown Converter

Converts HTML into clean Markdown right in your browser, which strips out the markup noise that wastes tokens in an LLM prompt. Paste HTML directly, or point it at a live URL.

IcoMoon

A free SVG icon editor and library with over 20,000 open source icons, plus tools to build and export your own icon fonts. Runs entirely in the browser.

Icon Buddy

A dreamy aggregation of the best open source and at-cost icons online today including Lucide, Material, Tabler, Font Awesome - and those are just a few.

iconify.design

My FAVORITE for icons Home of open source icon sets All popular icon sets, one framework. Over 300,000 open source vector icons.

Icons8

I use this one and Streamline when I can't find the just-right icon from the open source icon aggregators (like iconify.design for example) 1,510,800 free icons that match each other Large icon packs of over 10k icons, so you can find visually consistent icons for all your designs

Joplin

A free, open-source note-taking and to-do app that stores notes as Markdown. Syncs across devices with end-to-end encryption and clips web pages from the browser.

Kap

A free, open-source screen recorder for macOS. Exports to GIF, MP4, WebM or APNG, with plugins for sharing.

LibreOffice

A free, open-source office suite with word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, drawing and database apps. It opens and saves Microsoft Office files and runs on Windows, macOS and Linux.

Lightshot

A free screenshot tool for Windows and macOS. Select an area, mark it up, then save it or upload it for a shareable link.

LinkedIn Tools by Typegrow

A free suite of LinkedIn tools, including a carousel generator, post formatter, and hashtag finder. Handy for polishing a post before it goes out.

LogoKit

LogoKit is an API that returns company logos and brand data. You pass a domain name or a stock ticker, and it sends back the logo image. The free tier gives you 5,000 requests a day, and paid plans give you higher resolution and more requests.

Logseq (Open source)

A privacy-first, local-first note-taking outliner with backlinks, queries, and a graph view. Free and open source, with plugins if you want to extend it later.

LottieFiles tools

The LottieFiles tool directory: converters, editors and optimizers for Lottie animation files, collected in one place. Browse it when you need to change a Lottie without opening After Effects.

lucide-animated

lucide-animated is a set of more than 460 Lucide icons rebuilt as animated React components. Each icon plays an animation on hover. You copy the component code or install it with the shadcn CLI, and it is free under the MIT license.

MagicPattern tools

More than 30 browser tools for SVG and CSS patterns, gradients, blobs, halftones and other backgrounds, with some available as Figma plugins. Export code or images for design and front-end work.

Markdown to LaTeX to PDF template

A LaTeX template that lets you write in Markdown and publish to PDF. You keep one source that converts cleanly for online systems and still typesets properly for print. Open source on GitHub.

MiroTalk P2P

Free, open-source video calls that run in the browser. Start a call with one click, then chat and share your screen. No download, plug-in or login needed.

Monosnap

A screenshot and screen-recording app for Windows and macOS with annotation, blur and GIF recording. The free personal plan includes 2 GB of cloud storage for share links.

MyToolStudio

One page collecting more than 250 free browser tools: SEO checkers, developer utilities, schema generators, and image, PDF, and text helpers.

OG Image Maker

Makes Open Graph images, the picture that shows when a page is shared on social media, for blog posts and web pages. Free, with no watermark and no account.

Online Character Count Tool

This tool counts characters, words, sentences, and paragraphs in text you paste. It also shows how often each word appears and lets you exclude common words. It is free and needs no account.

RewritePal

A paraphrasing tool built to rewrite text without content filters getting in the way. Free to use, no sign-up required.

Savvyshot

A screenshot editor for Windows and macOS that adds padding, shadows and backgrounds so captures look presentation-ready. OCR auto-redacts email addresses. The free version adds a watermark.

ScreenPal

A screen recorder and video editor for tutorials and walkthroughs, with webcam and narration. The free plan has recording limits; paid plans add editing and hosting.

ScreenshotEdits

A screenshot editor for the web and macOS: blur, crop, annotate, redact and add gradient backgrounds. The web app is free with daily export limits; the Mac app is free with a small watermark.

ShareX

A free, open-source Windows app for screenshots, screen recordings and GIFs, with built-in annotation and OCR. It can upload each capture automatically to dozens of destinations.

Shottr

A fast macOS screenshot app with scrolling capture, OCR, annotation and on-screen measuring tools. Free to use; after 30 days it asks you to buy a $12 one-time license.

Social Share Preview

Paste a URL to see how its link preview looks on Facebook, LinkedIn, X and Pinterest, and which Open Graph tags are missing. Also available as a free browser extension.

Startup School

For anyone at the early stages of building a startup, turning a side project into a company, or anyone curious to learn about becoming a founder. Learn how to start a company, with help from the world's top startup accelerator - Y Combinator. Startup School is a free online course on how to start a startup.

Streamline icons

I use this one and icons8 when I can't find the just-right icon from the open source icon aggregators (like iconify.design for example) Download or copy svg & png icons 448,890 icons 34 families 172 sets Icon sets 50x larger than the industry average. Drawn in-house by a team of 8 icon designers. Stop wasting hours blending mismatched icons.

Super Designer pattern generator

Builds seamless background patterns from more than 150 shapes in a few clicks. Free to use in the browser.

SVG Backgrounds

SVG Backgrounds has background patterns, shape dividers, icons, and illustrations as SVG files. You pick a graphic, change the colors, then copy the CSS or download the SVG or PNG. Some graphics are free with attribution and the Pro collections need an All Access purchase.

svg.dev

Hands down one of my favorite most-used free tools for design. If you know, you know

Technical writing style guide

A thin template style guide for product, technical and user-facing documentation: structure, templates, language standards and accessibility requirements a team can actually apply without a style council.

The Noun Project

A library of millions of icons and photos from creators worldwide. Free to use with attribution, or royalty-free with a paid plan.

Unicorn Icons

More than 500 animated icons in Lottie and Rive formats. Change colour, stroke and speed in the browser, then export for React, Vue, iOS, Android or HTML. Free tier, with paid plans.

VLC media player

A free, open-source media player that plays almost any video or audio file, disc or stream without extra codecs. Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS.

Wappalyzer

Install a Chrome extension like Wappalyzer. When you see something in the wild that you like, a checkout flow, in-app message, help center, booking experience, analytics layer, or anything else relevant to your work, use it to see whether you can identify the technology behind it. You won’t always get the full answer, but it can reveal useful tools, patterns, and categories you may not have known to search for.

Xnapper

A macOS screenshot app that centers captures on a background and redacts sensitive details such as emails. Free with a watermark; a one-time license removes it.