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 6 of 27
Start as a shrimp, eat, evolve into something with teeth, and repeat in an ocean full of players doing exactly the same thing.
- 10 min
Fly a helicopter, wall off territory with towers, then defend the shape you just drew from everybody else.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Mix rain, keyboards, seagulls and a fireplace into one soundscape, then hand the whole mix to somebody as a single link.
- <1 min
- Sound on
A weekly newsletter of thoughtful links on design, technology and cities, with every past issue readable on the site without signing up.
German satirical news delivered with a completely straight face, plus a weekly video bulletin, running since 2008.
- 10 min
The 2007 original that turned maze building into a genre, played across a desktop with the icons still sitting on it.
- 10 min
- Desktop
A graphing calculator good enough that people make art with it — type a function and drag its parameters about.
- <1 min
Photographs of the city's abandoned schools and factories, paired with the records of the people who taught and worked in them.
- 10 min
Alarming research site about a chemical found in tumours, acid rain and every reservoir on earth. The chemical is water.
- 2 min
The original single-player dice conquest game: no accounts, no sound, no explanation, and still a perfect twenty minutes.
- 10 min
- Desktop
An avatar library where you can dial through a dozen illustration styles and copy the result straight out as an image.
- <1 min
A tank shooting polygons for experience, then branching down a surprisingly deep upgrade tree, from the maker of Agar.io.
- <1 min
- Desktop
Paste two blocks of text and get a colour-coded diff back immediately. Also handles PDFs, images and spreadsheets.
- <1 min
- Desktop
One search across thousands of American libraries, archives and museums, with curated exhibitions layered on top.
- 1 hr+
The same six panels of clip-art dinosaurs every day since 2003, with entirely different words in them each time.
A browsable index of every named dinosaur, with size comparisons and the period each one actually belonged to.
- 10 min
The catalogue of every physical release ever pressed, down to matrix numbers and pressing variants, plus what your copy is worth.
- 1 hr+
Machine learning journal where every paper is an interactive diagram; publication has stopped, the back catalogue has not aged.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
Turns any image into one-bit dithered grain, with a choice of classic algorithms and a two-colour palette picker.
- 2 min
Dithering aimed squarely at the chunky, ugly end of the spectrum, with palettes lifted from old hardware.
- 2 min
Serious dithering workbench with dozens of algorithms, custom palettes, live preview and a video mode as well.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Runs a standard or extended check to reveal which servers actually saw your DNS lookups. The quickest way to catch a VPN not doing its job.
- <1 min
Do Nothing
AltFA timer that counts how long you manage to do nothing at all. Move the mouse, press a key, or scroll and it starts again from zero.
Crowdsourced content warnings covering a hundred-odd specific triggers, so you can check beforehand rather than find out during.
- <1 min
Mine dogecoin with a shiba inu until you can afford to buy the moon. The year 2014, preserved in fully playable form.
- 10 min
A 1996 US presidential campaign website, still up, still exactly as it was. An accidental museum of early political web design.
- 2 min
Hundreds of dress-up games covering mythology, history and fandoms, drawn by actual artists rather than an asset pipeline.
- 10 min
An interface that forbids clicking entirely and makes you navigate by hovering, which is far stranger than it sounds.
- 2 min
- Desktop
A curated DOS library with working touch controls, which makes it the rare emulator front end that is usable on a phone.
- 10 min
- Sound on
Pixel canvas designed for thumbs first, fed by a huge stream of daily themed drawings from a mostly Japanese community.
Paste a website address and learn whether it is down for the whole world or only for you. Settles the argument with your router in seconds.
- <1 min
Team drawing race: two teams, one word, and the first side to guess it takes the round. Faster and shoutier than the alternatives.
- 10 min
Full flowchart, floorplan and network-diagram editor that saves to your own drive and has never once asked anyone for money.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Move the mouse and flowers, mushrooms and grass sprout underneath it while a music box plays. No tools, no undo, no point.
- <1 min
- Desktop
Draw and guess with a room code, or play solo against the clock on the evenings when nobody answers the group chat.
- 2 min
A directory that has been curating this genre since 2004, including a great many games nobody else bothered to archive.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
Short shots of interface design, illustration and branding from designers around the world. A mood board that never quite ends.
- 10 min
One button, one endless right angle, one car sliding off the edge of the world. The purest possible drifting game.
Tune a car, hold the handbrake and score points for angle rather than lap times. The garage is quietly the actual game.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Precise Hindu calendar giving tithi, nakshatra and auspicious timings for any date and location. Astronomically rigorous throughout.
Dashcam footage of a city loop with the local radio playing over it, so you can drive slowly through Istanbul while answering email.
- <1 min
- Sound on
- Desktop
Balance a truck over obstacle courses clearly designed by somebody who has never driven anything at all.
Search without the profile building, plus bang shortcuts that fire your query straight at another site. Type an exclamation and w for Wikipedia.
- <1 min
Thirty-two Wordle boards at once, thirty-seven guesses, no mercy. The logical end point of the whole 2022 craze.
- 10 min
- Desktop
JavaScript demos in 140 characters. The gap between how little code there is and what appears is the whole appeal.
- 10 min
- Desktop
A rotating globe with every wind current on Earth drawn as moving lines, and layers underneath for ocean currents, particulates and the jet stream.
- <1 min
Nature recordings from named places with coordinates attached, so you know exactly which rainforest you are sitting in.
- 10 min
- Sound on
Thousands of public webcams pointed at squares, harbours, volcanoes and building sites, some with archives stretching back decades.
- <1 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.