It’s 9:40 on a Tuesday night. The school form has to go back as one PDF, and what you have is four photos on your phone, two of them sideways. The first search result wants you to install something; the second wants your card number “for verification.” Neither is necessary. Every site below opens in a browser tab, does one job, and costs nothing — and next to each one you’ll see where the free version stops — the part these lists leave out.
Don’t read all 17. Scan the four headings, find the one that matches the job on your desk today, and bookmark it.
When you have the wrong kind of file
Your bank wants a PDF. Your printer wants a JPEG. The job application wants a .docx and you wrote it in Pages. Two minutes each.
- CloudConvert — cloudconvert.com. Click Select File, then set the two dropdowns that read “PDF” to “DOCX.” It handles 212 formats across 11 categories, including CAD drawings, fonts and e-books ordinary converters refuse. Free: 10 conversions a day, 1 GB per file.
- Squoosh — squoosh.app. The page says only Drop OR Paste. Drag a photo in and the right panel re-compresses it as WebP or AVIF, original beside result, so you catch the moment quality breaks. It states: “Images never leave your device since Squoosh does all the work locally.”
- PDF24 Tools — tools.pdf24.org. Twenty-four PDF tools on one grid: Merge PDF, Split PDF, Compress PDF, PDF OCR, Unlock PDF, no account. It is also the only site here that says how long your file sits on its server: “Files are automatically deleted from the PDF24 server after one hour.”
- EZGIF — ezgif.com. Open Video tools, upload an MP4, MOV, MKV, AVI or WMV, and cut a GIF out of the exact seconds you want. Max file size: 200MB.
When something needs cleaning up
Three of these repair a picture; the fourth repairs your writing. Give one five minutes before deciding it wasn’t the tool.
- TinyPNG — tinypng.com. The box says Drop your images here! Its own page claims up to 80 percent off a PNG, JPEG or WebP without your eye catching the difference, 20 images at once, 5 MB each — the difference between an email that sends and one that bounces.
- remove.bg — that is the whole address, remove.bg, with no .com on the end. Drop in a product shot or a portrait and it hands back a PNG with real transparency, no button to press after the upload. The free download caps at 0.25 megapixel, roughly 625 x 400: fine for a Facebook post, useless in print.
- Cleanup.pictures — the home page reads Drag & drop an image above to get started for free. Paint over the stranger in the background, the watermark, the power line, and the software rebuilds what belongs behind it. Its pricing table puts the free tier at “Resolution limited to 720p.”
- Hemingway Editor — hemingwayapp.com. Paste your text in the browser, no account, and every sentence too long to follow gets marked. Per the official documentation: red is hardest to read, yellow heavy but milder, blue flags Adverbs, Passive Voice and Qualifiers, purple means a simpler word exists.
When you need to check something before you act
These five answer a question in about a minute, four of them before you do something you can’t take back.
- Have I Been Pwned — haveibeenpwned.com. Type your email address and press Check. It names which companies leaked your account and when. In September 2026 it was searching 1,034 breached sites and more than 17.8 billion accounts.
- Wayback Machine — web.archive.org. Paste any address and a calendar of blue dots appears — click a date and you read that page exactly as it stood that day, including the paragraph a company deleted last week. Save Page Now freezes a dated copy today — what you want before a dispute over a price.
- VirusTotal — virustotal.com. The tabs read FILE, URL and SEARCH. Upload the attachment your “bank” sent, or paste the link from that text message, and it runs past over 70 antivirus scanners at once. Free for non-commercial use.
- Project Gutenberg — gutenberg.org. As of September 2026, 79,338 books whose copyright has expired: Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Austen, Twain. The home page says “100% Free – No fees, no registration, completely free.” Start in Frequently Downloaded.
- JustWatch — justwatch.com. Search a title and see which services carry it today in your country, instead of opening Netflix, Prime Video, Max, Hulu and Disney+ to learn it’s on none of them.
When you have to make something and don’t own the software
Adobe wants a subscription. These four want a browser tab and one afternoon.
- Photopea — photopea.com. Nothing to install, no account. It opens PSD, AI, PDF, INDD, CDR, Figma, SVG and camera RAW from Canon (CR2, CR3), Nikon (NEF) and Sony (ARW) with layers and masks intact, so the designer who emailed you a .psd is no longer your problem. Free, with ads down the right-hand side.
- Excalidraw — excalidraw.com. Draw the org chart or the flow of who approves what, in a hand-sketched style that stops people arguing about fonts. Its README lists export to PNG and SVG and autosave to the browser. MIT licensed.
- Google Fonts — fonts.google.com. More than 1,900 type families cleared for commercial use, most under the SIL Open Font License — a logo, a client’s brochure, no licensing bill later.
- Pexels — pexels.com. Photos and video you can legally drop into a paid ad. The license reads “All photos and videos on Pexels are free to use” and “Attribution is not required.”
The catch nobody tells you
Lists like this use the word free as though it meant the same thing 17 times. It doesn’t. Free means free up to a ceiling, and you meet the ceiling after the work is done. Where each one stops:
- remove.bg hands you 0.25 megapixel. Send that to a print shop and it comes back looking like a fax.
- Cleanup.pictures exports at 720p free. Your original was four thousand pixels wide.
- Hemingway‘s green highlight — grammar and spelling — is the paid feature; the other four colors are free. And the color key repeated online for years (“green is passive voice”) is out of date. Today’s documentation puts adverbs, passive voice and qualifiers all in blue.
- CloudConvert is 10 conversions a day now. Plenty of articles still print 25; those were written once and never opened again.
- TinyPNG compresses 20 images at a time, but converting between formats is capped at 3.
- Save Page Now saves one page, one time. It does not crawl the site or follow the links inside it — archive each page separately.
Then there’s the link that changed owners. justdelete.me was a fixture of these lists for a decade — a directory of where to delete your accounts. Today that address redirects to backgroundchecks.org, a company that compiles records about people. Same familiar name, different landlord. The reverse happens too: Google announced the end of Squoosh in 2023, and it still loads and compresses in 2026 — the code sits open on GitHub, with no new release since. Check the date on any list of websites before trusting it. One hijacked link makes you doubt the other 16.
And here’s the test to run on any list, this one included. If an item calls a site “a game changer” without naming the task and the limit, the writer never opened it. A real recommendation reads like a job plus a number: up to 80 percent off a PNG, 20 at a time, 5 MB each.
One last thing on your phone. All 17 open in a phone browser, but four are miserable there: Squoosh, Photopea, Excalidraw and Google Fonts were built for dragging and side panels on a big screen.
Don’t save all 17. Pick the one matching what you were trying to do before you opened this page — the file that won’t convert, the account you’re afraid was leaked — open it now and finish that one task. A tool you used once, you’ll remember next year. A folder of 17 bookmarks is one you’ll never open again.