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 3 of 27
One-button basketball in which the players, the ball and the court are all changed at random between points, deliberately.
- 2 min
Run a basketball franchise through thirty simulated seasons in an afternoon: drafts, trades, contracts and ageing, all free.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
Two-on-two street basketball stripped back to dunking, blocking and a shot meter you will consistently misjudge.
- 2 min
Thousands of recipes in metric with honest timings and star ratings left by people who genuinely cooked the thing.
- 2 min
Eight hours on the networks that existed before the internet reached homes, released free by the person who made it.
- 1 hr+
- Sound on
The front page of Bear, a no-frills blogging platform: a feed of trending and recent posts that are short, personal and free of ads.
Chiptune tracker with a whole song's worth of channels, shareable as a URL that contains the entire tune inside it.
- 10 min
- Sound on
- Desktop
Photo editor and collage maker aimed squarely at people who want a decent result without learning anything first.
- 10 min
Full portfolio case studies in branding, illustration, photography and motion, with the sketches and process behind the finished work.
- 10 min
- Desktop
A company worth hundreds of billions serves a homepage of plain blue links, unchanged since the 1990s and quietly proud of it.
- <1 min
Annual contest in which vision scientists compete to fool you, with every finalist since 2005 still watchable.
- 10 min
A daily showcase of early-stage startups looking for their first users, sorted by topic. A preview of what might be everywhere next year.
Maths explained by intuition first and formulas second, by someone who clearly resented how he was taught it.
The personality model psychologists actually use, in a clean 120-question version with a proper breakdown of every facet.
- 10 min
A countdown big enough to read from the back of the room, which is the only real requirement a workshop timer has.
- <1 min
- Sound on
- Desktop
Centuries of natural history books scanned page by page, including illustrations nobody has looked at in decades.
- 1 hr+
Cyberpunk progression game where the way forward is writing real JavaScript to automate your own hacking. Learning it is the game.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
Anonymous celebrity riddles where readers do the detective work in the comments and are occasionally proved right.
- 10 min
Community for adding glitter, sparkles and animated hearts to photographs, still busily active long after the trend died.
- 10 min
The volunteer lightning detection network behind most live strike maps, with raw data and instructions for building your own receiver.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Drag four blobs up and down and they sing genuine four-part harmony, trained on real opera singers, always in key.
- <1 min
- Sound on
Sculpt a glossy blob with sliders for noise, light and iridescence, then leave it rotating and admire your handiwork.
- 2 min
- Desktop
Monkeys pop balloons along a fixed path, and the upgrade trees behind that sentence are deep enough to justify the reputation.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Browser Minecraft with party modes bolted on — parkour, bed wars, one-block survival — and multiplayer that joins in one click.
- 10 min
Roll a rectangular block across floating tiles into a hole, with switches placed to force you to think in three dimensions.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Ben Eater's flocking simulation with the three rules exposed as sliders, so you can break the flock deliberately.
- <1 min
- Desktop
A long-running directory of wonderful things: odd gadgets, art, science and internet culture, posted every day by a small team of editors.
Eleven absurd brushes — blobs, tentacles, exploding dots — that make the composition decisions for you the moment you move.
- <1 min
- Desktop
The cat plays whatever key you press, on bongos, a keyboard or a full drum kit. Peak internet, and still maintained.
- <1 min
- Sound on
Physics sumo where everybody is a circle, the only verb is shove, and the arena keeps getting smaller until someone falls off.
- <1 min
- Desktop
A blog that has been finding the best browser escape and point-and-click games every week since 2005, and is still posting.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
Endless listicles of art, design mishaps and comment-section drama, engineered to eat a lunch break whole.
- 1 hr+
The original boredom portal, still sorting thousands of time-wasters into categories with no discernible editorial filter.
The screensaver logo in full screen, with a counter for how many times it has hit the corner while you waited.
- <1 min
- Desktop
Code-breaking tools and a cipher identifier for when you have a string of nonsense and no idea what it is.
- <1 min
Plain, well-sorted illusion collection with the explanation directly underneath each one, from café walls to impossible triangles.
- 10 min
Tens of thousands of riddles, brain teasers and lateral thinking problems submitted by users since 1999.
Dual n-back, the working-memory drill psychologists keep arguing about, implemented properly and charted over time.
- 10 min
A scrappy free collection of brain teasers and n-back drills that has been quietly online since long before the app stores existed.
- 10 min
- Desktop
A search engine built on its own independent index with no profiling of searchers, and filters that let anyone re-rank results by their own rules.
People staple bread to trees and photograph it. There is no deeper explanation available and no sign of it stopping.
- 2 min
The write-draw-write chain game that predates the current crop, still running, still free and still producing pure nonsense.
- 10 min
Brown bears standing in an Alaskan waterfall catching salmon in mid-air, live from Katmai, and the reason Fat Bear Week exists.
One page per leak channel — WebGL, canvas, WebRTC, DNS — each showing precisely what your browser hands over without being asked.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Every recipe costed per serving and per batch, with step photos throughout. Built for people cooking against an actual number.
- 10 min
Weaponised arcade racing around an open city, with the loud handling model of a mid-2000s console game.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Chuck banknotes into an open grave with the mouse, accompanied by an unreasonably committed soundtrack.
- <1 min
- Sound on
- Desktop
Plays the notification sounds of Slack, email and Teams on a loop so it sounds like somebody urgently needs you.
- <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.