Useful websites, apps and tricks that save money or time - the kind of thing people are glad someone told them about.
Point your camera at a chair, a jacket or a plant and find the same or similar products for sale - and often cheaper look-alikes.
Useful for: Furniture · Fashion · Home products
Price trackers show a product's past prices, so you can see whether today's sale price is actually low - and set an alert for a drop.
Useful for: Amazon purchases · Electronics · Big-ticket items
If your dates are fixed but the destination isn't, some flight search engines list the cheapest places to fly from your airport.
Useful for: Weekend trips · Flexible holidays
Apps let cafés, bakeries and shops sell food they would otherwise throw away, for a fraction of the price, collected at the end of the day.
Useful for: Cheap meals · Reducing waste
Refurbished marketplaces sell tested second-hand phones and laptops with a warranty - often far cheaper than new.
Useful for: Phones · Laptops · Tablets
Merge, split, compress, convert and even OCR PDFs in the browser for free - no sign-up needed.
Useful for: Forms · Scans · Applications
AI tools can read a long report or contract and answer questions about it, citing the pages - so you can check the answer yourself.
Useful for: Reports · Contracts · Studying
AI background removal takes seconds in the browser - useful for product photos, profile pictures and presentations.
Useful for: Selling online · Profile photos
Browser compressors cut image file sizes dramatically with no visible difference - handy for upload limits and email attachments.
Useful for: Email · Forms with size limits · Websites
AI speech enhancement can make a recording made on a phone in a noisy room sound close to studio quality.
Useful for: Podcasts · Voice notes · Interviews
Open-source speech recognition can run on your own machine, so recordings never leave it.
Useful for: Interviews · Lectures · Sensitive recordings
Document comparison highlights every change between two versions of a contract or policy - no more reading both side by side.
Useful for: Contracts · Policies · Revisions
Instead of retyping, open-source tools extract tables from PDFs into spreadsheets.
Useful for: Reports · Bank statements · Data
Enter your email to see which known data breaches included it - then change those passwords.
Useful for: Account security
The Internet Archive keeps snapshots of websites over time - useful for deleted pages or checking what a page used to say.
Useful for: Research · Deleted pages · Price or policy changes
AI research tools answer questions and link their sources; academic search engines find the papers themselves.
Useful for: Homework · Fact-checking · Work research
Automation tools connect apps: new form entries into a spreadsheet, email attachments into a folder, meeting notes into tasks.
Useful for: Admin work · Small business · Teams
AI notetakers join video calls, transcribe them and send a summary with action items. Tell participants you're recording.
Useful for: Work meetings · Interviews · Lectures
Readability editors highlight long sentences and passive voice so emails and reports get to the point.
Useful for: Emails · Reports · Applications
A professional-grade editor used for films has a free version, and open-source editors have no watermarks.
Useful for: YouTube · School projects · Family videos
Route planners compare trains, buses, flights, ferries and driving between any two places, with rough prices.
Useful for: Trips · Commuting in a new city
Community sites list alternatives to any app, filtered by free, open source and platform.
Useful for: Replacing subscriptions · Switching platforms
Outage trackers show whether a website or app is down for other people too, with a map of reports.
Useful for: Outages · Troubleshooting
Open-source AI upscalers run on your computer - no uploads, no watermarks.
Useful for: Old photos · Printing small images
New entries are reviewed by a person and their websites checked before they appear. Suggest a website.