Collection
No sign-up, no email
Free, immediately usable and not interested in your email address. A shrinking category, which is why it gets its own page.
1,269 sites · page 1 of 27
Disposable inbox that self-destructs after ten minutes. Exactly what you want when a download demands an email address first.
- <1 min
Fly out through a mapped model of our stellar neighbourhood until the Sun is one unremarkable dot among thousands.
- <1 min
- Desktop
A countdown of a thousand small good things, from the cold side of the pillow to popping bubble wrap, written daily for years.
The blunt one-minute word test that has served as the internet's default words-per-minute benchmark for over a decade.
- <1 min
- Desktop
The Myers-Briggs-flavoured test everybody has taken, with a four-letter verdict and profile pages that are unnervingly specific.
- 10 min
A directory of blogs and tools that load in under one megabyte, kept as a quiet protest against bloated pages. Every link opens almost instantly.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Build ramps and walls while shooting, which is Fortnite's endgame extracted, simplified and handed over for free.
- 10 min
- Desktop
The original tile-merging game, written in a weekend and responsible for an enormous amount of lost 2014.
Mahjong solitaire in a dozen layouts with no download and no account, exactly as it was on every family PC in 2004.
- 10 min
A community of personal website makers with tutorials, events and a directory of members' handmade sites to wander between.
The largest archive of 360 panoramas anywhere, pinned to a world map and free to browse, covering plenty of places no Street View car reached.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Grant Sanderson's maths lessons, plus the written versions of the animations that made linear algebra look like geometry.
- 10 min
- Sound on
A ranked list of websites that weigh less than half a megabyte. A tour of the fast, lightweight personal web, sorted from tiniest to merely small.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Straightforward pool on a proper physics table, against an opponent who punishes a lazy break immediately.
- 2 min
Miniclip's pool game, still the default way to lose imaginary money to a stranger in another country at half past two.
- 2 min
Seventy statements, four political axes and an ideology label at the end. The open-source template for a hundred imitators.
- 10 min
Collection of period-correct cursor trails — rainbows, bubbles, snowflakes, ghosts — demoed live so you can wave the mouse about.
- <1 min
- Desktop
Windows 98 rebuilt in JavaScript, right down to the window chrome and the sound the error dialogs make.
The meme feed that reposts everything eventually, sorted into channels so you can choose your particular poison.
- 1 hr+
Starts as one button beside a dying fire and quietly becomes something much larger. Best played without reading anything about it first.
- 1 hr+
Hand-picked, highly rated films that were never blockbusters, filterable by mood and by where you can currently stream them.
- 2 min
Ten sliders — rain, thunder, waves, birds, coffee — mixed on a single page with nothing else on it at all.
- <1 min
- Sound on
Photographic essays on ruined institutions that are far more interested in why the places closed than in the broken glass.
- 10 min
Guided write-ups of the city's empty hospitals, airfields and amusement parks, complete with directions and a note on the fence situation.
- 10 min
Twenty-eight escalating trolley dilemmas that end somewhere very silly, each showing the percentage of people who agreed with you.
- 10 min
Thousands of free electronics tutorials with full wiring diagrams and working code. The gentlest on-ramp to microcontrollers there is.
- 10 min
One of the oldest portals still standing, from the era when a game loading in thirty seconds counted as instant.
- <1 min
- Desktop
The proper colour wheel — analogous, triadic, split complementary — plus contrast checks for accessibility.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Unfiltered aircraft tracking, including the private jets and military flights that the commercial trackers politely agree to hide.
- <1 min
- Desktop
Waterhole cameras in southern African reserves, running since the nineties, where nothing happens for an hour and then everything does.
Be a cell, eat smaller cells, flee larger ones and split to ambush. The game that invented this entire genre in 2015.
- <1 min
Janelle Shane feeds neural networks recipes, paint names and knitting patterns, then reports the wreckage with real affection.
- 1 hr+
Click targets as they pop up and get scored in targets per second. Shooter players use it to warm up before a session.
- 2 min
- Desktop
Live flight tracking with airport arrival boards and playback of earlier flights, formerly known as RadarBox and still free to browse.
Aerial 360 panoramas shot from helicopters and drones over volcanoes, cathedrals and Antarctic ice, most of them enormous files worth the wait.
- 10 min
The lab page of the psychologist whose completely static images refuse to stop rotating, added to for over twenty years.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Professional reviews, genre family trees and similar-artist chains inherited from the print era, which is how you get from one band to fifty.
- 1 hr+
Vast crowd-sourced recipe database where the comments are the actual feature — thousands of people telling you what to change.
- 2 min
Type the name of any app and get a crowd-ranked list of alternatives, filtered by platform, price and whether the project is open source.
AltF Pulse
AltFA paused editorial preview that explains the sourcing and publishing controls required before stories return.
- 10 min
Community-built soundscapes of unhinged specificity, including several hundred separate takes on the Hogwarts common room.
- 10 min
- Sound on
- Desktop
An ambient radio station with no announcers, no adverts and nothing that ever resolves, aimed squarely at falling asleep.
- 10 min
- Sound on
Genuine industrial surplus sold with the best product copy on the internet: lab glassware, small motors, and 400 unexplained springs.
- 10 min
Fingerprints your browser and compares it against a research dataset of hundreds of thousands of others. The verdict is usually: unique.
- 2 min
- Desktop
Free woodworking plans with cut lists and costed materials, aimed squarely at people who own exactly one saw.
- 10 min
Type your address and spin the globe back 750 million years to see where that ground sat, and which ocean was sitting on top of it.
- 2 min
AniList's seasonal grid: everything airing this season in one scroll, sortable by popularity, score or start date.
- 2 min
Obsessively detailed database going down to individual episode credits and file hashes. Built for cataloguers, not for browsing.
- 10 min
- Desktop
How we picked these
Every entry in Detour is hand-sorted rather than scraped: filed under one category, given one to three moods, and placed in a time band for how quickly it pays off. The practical facts — cost, sign-up, sound, device and whether it is safe at a desk — are recorded per site and shown on every card, so you can rule things out before you click.
No sign-up, no email: questions
How many sites are in “No sign-up, no email”?
1,269 sites, each hand-sorted by category, mood and how long it takes to pay off. 18 of them are AltF originals that run right here.
Which of these sites are free with no sign-up?
1,269 of the 1,269 are free and need no account. None of them are paid.
Do these sites work on a phone, and are they safe for work?
819 of 1,269 work on a phone; the rest are desktop only. 1,263 are safe for work and 1,136 work with the sound off.