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 22 of 27
Breed meat, then drones, then queens, then things with far too many legs. The exponential curve is the entire narrative.
- 1 hr+
Ascending through increasingly abstract mathematics, with a community that treats optimising it as a competitive spreadsheet sport.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
Base building with tameable pets, farming and raids, which is a lot of systems for something that loads instantly.
- 10 min
- Desktop
World atlas of traditional dishes and the specific places that still make them properly. Endless, and reliably makes you hungry.
- 1 hr+
Name something you liked and it returns things with the same texture, spanning films, books, music and games at once.
- 2 min
A collaborative database of example sentences translated across languages, better than any dictionary for context.
Train an image or sound classifier from your own webcam in about three minutes, no code involved. The clearest explanation of machine learning built.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Non-commercial web search indexing only pages carrying no ads or trackers at all. A very small and very different internet.
Sprint away from a large monkey along a crumbling temple path, dying at the same badly signposted corner every time.
- 2 min
The other GIF keyboard, with better tagging for reaction clips and a sticker library your phone already quietly uses.
- <1 min
Graded summaries of the terms you agreed to without reading, with the specific alarming clause quoted. Volunteer-run since 2012.
Hundreds of players carve up a real world map using one attack slider. Diplomacy emerges in the chat within ninety seconds.
- 10 min
Competitive multiplayer stacking with modern rules and opponents who will finesse you into the floor within ninety seconds.
- 10 min
- Desktop
The official browser Tetris, marathon mode included, so you can settle the argument about whether you are still any good.
- 10 min
One click copies the Lenny face, the shrug or the look of disapproval to your clipboard, correctly escaped.
- <1 min
Type a word, pick from several hundred FIGlet fonts, and get the enormous ASCII banner your terminal deserves.
- <1 min
Converts an uploaded photograph into ASCII, HTML or coloured text art, with the character density under your control.
- 2 min
- Desktop
Thousands of browser-playable parser and choice games, plus Quest, the authoring tool most of them were written in.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
Everything people typed at each other on bulletin board systems before the web existed, preserved as plain text and left open.
- 1 hr+
An air horn in a browser tab, installable offline, built by Google engineers as a demo and adopted as a weapon.
- <1 min
- Sound on
A personality test that assigns you one of forty-odd animals, with write-ups considerably sharper than the premise deserves.
Spawns browser windows that dance around the screen and refuse to sit still, harmless but genuinely infuriating.
- 2 min
- Sound on
- Desktop
Daily edit of objects, gear and short videos picked by somebody with taste and no obvious interest in sponsorship.
- 10 min
Satire from a conservative and Christian angle, useful mainly as a read on what the other newsroom finds absurd.
- 10 min
Wiki for an infinite office nobody built, mapped level by level in damp yellow carpet by contributors who take it extremely seriously.
- 1 hr+
Canadian satire that assumes you follow Canadian politics, and rewards you handsomely if you happen to.
- 10 min
Australia's oldest newspaper, filed from a town with no remaining population, covering the nation with dead-eyed accuracy.
- 10 min
Teaches the pen tool by making you trace shapes with the fewest possible anchor points. Level nine is genuinely cruel.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Millions of pages of declassified government documents prised out by freedom of information requests, free to browse.
The gentle way into fragment shaders, with every example editable in the page and redrawing itself as you type.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
Combine shapes with union, subtract and intersect to hit a target silhouette in as few operations as you can manage.
- 10 min
- Desktop
One button, escalating nonsense, and no way onward except pressing it again. Works on a phone, which is the danger.
One large red button and a clear instruction not to press it. It gets increasingly personal about the fact that you keep pressing it.
Sweet wrappers collected and annotated for decades, arranged by how well the graphic design has survived contact with the present.
- 10 min
Profiles of thousands of American cold case disappearances, written and maintained by one person for decades.
The Australian team that built a career on television stunts, still publishing headlines that get them into trouble.
- 10 min
Every component you might need to build, with links to how twenty different design systems each named and handled it.
- 10 min
British satire in short bitter columns, mostly concerning the middle classes and the people who irritate them.
A reference of every chart type and what each is genuinely for, worth reading before defaulting to a bar chart.
- 10 min
Scroll from the surface to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, meeting every creature at the depth it actually lives.
- 10 min
Animal rescue stories with the video attached, engineered from the ground up to make you cry quietly at your desk.
- 10 min
- Sound on
A volunteer register of unidentified remains and missing people, matched by amateurs who keep on succeeding.
A scholarly reference to the whole genre, free to read, covering authors nobody else ever bothered to write up.
A playable account of why cooperation appears and then collapses, using game theory and roughly ten minutes of attention.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Bisect angles, find midpoints and judge parallels by eye, then get told in pixels precisely how wrong you were.
- 2 min
- Desktop
The original page describing the World Wide Web project, restored by CERN at its first address. Plain text and a few links.
- <1 min
Complete texts, timelines and scholarship for a writer whose entire output is public domain, on a site that has barely changed since 1994.
- 1 hr+
One of the first things the internet ever collectively lost its mind over, and it is still rows of dancing rodents and one loop.
- <1 min
- Sound on
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.