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 5 of 27
Palette generator trained on photographs and films, so the colours it suggests look like they came from somewhere real.
- 2 min
- Desktop
Team deathmatch with a built-in level editor, played mostly by people who memorised every map years ago.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Petabytes of crawled web pages released free for anyone to analyse. Most of the language models you have used started here.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
Interactive models of what complexity science likes best — epidemics, flocking, synchronisation, forest fires.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
Sixteen words, four hidden groups, four mistakes allowed. The traps are the entire point and they are very carefully set.
- 2 min
An audio museum of sounds made by objects that no longer exist — dial tones, shutter clicks, the whirr of a rewinding tape.
- 10 min
- Sound on
Home consoles from the Atari era onward, running in the browser. Mostly worse than you remember, which is part of the appeal.
- 10 min
- Sound on
- Desktop
Guess the secret word and be told only how semantically close you got. Rank 4,000 feels like progress, and it very much is not.
- 10 min
Home of Conway's Game of Life — pattern archive, wiki and a board for setting your own cells running.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Click the cookie, buy grandmas, buy portals, accidentally summon something. The game that turned incrementals into a genre.
- 1 hr+
Recipes laid out as a table of operations instead of prose, so you can see at a glance what combines with what and when.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Generates hero images — gradients, particles, triangles, topography — at whatever resolution you need, free to download.
- <1 min
The site every school network forgot to block, still hosting Run 3, Fireboy and Watergirl and almost no actual mathematics.
- <1 min
Chrome, flames and bevelled gradients — the 2003 logo generator, still online and still producing exactly that.
- 2 min
- Desktop
Hit the space bar for a five-colour palette, lock the ones you like, hit it again. The whole tool is that loop.
- <1 min
Nest and feeder cams run by the Cornell Lab, with ornithologists in the chat explaining what the bird is doing and why it matters.
One button that adds unicorns and rainbows to any web page, solving a problem that has never once been reported.
- <1 min
Upload any file and receive a genuinely corrupted version back. Built for missing deadlines, used mostly for art.
- <1 min
The same premise with different flavours of damage — choose the format and how thoroughly you want it ruined.
- <1 min
The EFF's test showing how uniquely identifiable your browser is from fonts, plugins and screen size alone. Most people are one in millions.
- 2 min
- Desktop
Blind items published daily since 2006, unverifiable by design, and treated as scripture by a very large comment section.
The biggest browser arcade going, with genuinely decent HTML5 ports and a search that mostly finds the game you meant.
- <1 min
A few hundred browser escape rooms in one filtered shelf, all running in the tab with nothing to install and nothing to buy.
- 2 min
The entire tower defence shelf in one place, sorted by how many people are currently playing, none of it requiring an account.
- 10 min
The tidied-up archive of internet horror folklore, from Slender Man to the stories a school friend swore blind were true.
- 1 hr+
Reader-submitted horror stories with narrated versions, sorted so you can pick your poison: rituals, dolls, or something in the loft.
- 10 min
Scores films for you by finding users whose past ratings track yours, then weighting their opinions. Recommendation with the maths shown.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Translates a cron expression into plain English as you type it, then tells you when it will next fire. Ends a very specific argument.
- <1 min
- Desktop
Wordle in reverse: you are handed the green and yellow clues and have to reconstruct the guesses that could have produced them.
- 10 min
Frogger with better manners: hop a chicken across roads, rivers and railway lines until the inevitable lorry.
- 2 min
An explorable on how ideas and riots spread through a social network, with the contagion thresholds under your control.
- 10 min
Where every cruise ship in the world currently is, with deck plans and itineraries attached, for reasons entirely your own.
Chain encoders and classical ciphers together and watch text transform between formats at each step.
- <1 min
- Desktop
Builds a gradient visually and hands over the CSS, including the awkward multi-stop and radial cases.
- <1 min
Sugar-coated filler text for wireframes, with sliders for exactly how sweet and how long the nonsense should be.
- <1 min
The volunteer-edited web directory that outlived DMOZ, still organising the internet into a category tree by hand.
Tower defence from the villain's side, defending your gems from heroes using demons, orcs and the undead.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Crude four-panel strips with a mean streak, running since 2005 and still finding fresh ways to end badly.
GCHQ's public knife for decoding and decrypting data, built by dragging operations into a pipeline.
- 10 min
- Desktop
The animator who taught the internet to be afraid of cows, with every looping nightmare he has made collected in one place.
- 10 min
- Sound on
Long, carefully researched articles on forgotten disasters, obsessives and near misses from history.
- 1 hr+
Screenshots of manipulative interfaces caught in the wild, named and dissected. Grimly entertaining reading.
- 10 min
A weekly newsletter of unusual public datasets, with an archive of thousands you had no idea were collected.
- 10 min
Over a hundred thousand high-resolution scanned maps, georeferenced and free to zoom into more or less indefinitely.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
Several hundred cipher, code and puzzle solvers in one place, from Caesar shifts to crossword pattern matching.
- <1 min
Field reports and photographs of American shopping centres in decline, written by people who cared about this long before it was an aesthetic.
- 1 hr+
Fast browser shooter with no account and no download: click, spawn, and get eliminated by somebody considerably better.
- 2 min
- Desktop
Harry Brignull's catalogue of interfaces built to trick people, complete with a hall of shame and the resulting case law.
- 10 min
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.