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 7 of 27
The 2001 humour portal that somehow still updates, with the same mix of clips, pictures and questionable taste.
- 10 min
- Not at work
- Sound on
Interactive classroom illusions you can drag, toggle and pause, which makes the effects considerably harder to dismiss.
- 10 min
- Desktop
A search engine that funds tree-planting projects with its profits and publishes regular reports showing where the money went.
Drag left and right to slap a man in the face with an eel, at whatever speed the day seems to call for.
- <1 min
- Desktop
The carbon intensity of the grid across most of the world, coloured by how clean each country's electricity happens to be at this minute.
- <1 min
A museum of Google easter eggs that Google removed — gravity, the barrel roll, the mirrored search — all restored and working.
- 10 min
- Desktop
One sincere, specific compliment per click, written by people rather than generated. For days that have not gone well.
- <1 min
Enormous archive of emoji strings, kaomoji and text arrangements, searchable by whatever you are trying to say.
- 2 min
Every Google emoji mashup, searchable — pick two and get the official illustrated hybrid back as a PNG.
- <1 min
Upload a photograph and it rebuilds the entire thing out of emoji, colour-matched one tile at a time.
- 2 min
- Desktop
Shows you an emoji and starts a timer while you run round the room pointing your phone camera at the real object.
- 2 min
Search, click, paste, with nothing else on the page competing for attention, which is precisely the point.
- <1 min
Two emoji in, one hybrid out, with a randomiser for when you cannot decide which pairing to ruin next.
- <1 min
Every emoji with its meaning, its history and how it renders on each platform. Settles arguments in one link.
- 10 min
A simulated 1990s desktop with a working browser, games and applications, assembled as a preservation project rather than a joke.
- 1 hr+
- Sound on
- Desktop
The professional encyclopedia, still going, and a useful second opinion whenever Wikipedia gets contested.
- 10 min
An ASCII horse whose legs continue for as long as you are willing to keep scrolling, which is longer than you think.
Twenty-five years of accidentally poetic English on packaging and signage, photographed across East Asia.
- 10 min
A daily firehose of new escape games from Japanese and indie developers, with walkthroughs in the comments for when you stall.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
Fifty million digitised items from European museums, libraries and archives, behind one search box.
- 1 hr+
Halo-styled arena shooter running in WebGL, with vehicles, sniping and remarkably few visible compromises.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Thousands of strangers claim to have dreamt the same face. Read the whole thing: the explanation is better than the hoax.
- 2 min
A scatterplot of six thousand music genres you have never heard of, each one clickable for a sample and a list of its bands.
- 1 hr+
- Sound on
- Desktop
Slide across a stack of time zones and see the hour for everyone at once. The quickest way to find a meeting slot that spans continents.
- <1 min
All 2^122 version-four UUIDs listed in order with a working search box, on a page that should not be able to exist.
Obsessive gallery of what strangers keep in their pockets, photographed from above and argued over at remarkable length.
- 10 min
Infinite pixel canvas anybody can paint on live, with no undo, no brief and no moderation queue worth mentioning.
- 10 min
Found VHS footage cut into collages by a collective that also owns most of the world's remaining copies of Jerry Maguire.
- 10 min
- Sound on
Writing community from 1999 where each subject gets personal essays instead of an encyclopaedia entry, and the tone never settles.
- 1 hr+
Design a creature from joints and muscles, then watch a genetic algorithm spend hundreds of generations teaching it to limp.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Idle evolution from primordial soup to interstellar empire, with dozens of species branches and an enormous technology tree.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
Hand-drawn-looking diagrams that somehow stay legible, with live collaboration and no account. The whiteboard for people who hate whiteboards.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Point-and-click cabinet of grotesque curiosities where every drawer you open contains a small, beautifully animated unpleasantness.
- 10 min
- Sound on
- Desktop
Philosophers dropped into absurd situations, with an explanatory footnote in case you skipped that seminar.
Search any Android app and see the tracking libraries baked into it. The results for the popular ones are routinely grim.
Hundreds of playful projects from Google and creative coders: AI drawing games, music toys and odd interfaces, most of them running in the browser.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
Paste a terrifying shell command and it pulls the whole thing apart, annotating every flag from the relevant man page.
- <1 min
- Desktop
The hub for playable posts — effectively the index for the entire genre of learn-by-fiddling essays.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
The largest collection of live nature cams anywhere: bear falls, puppy rooms, osprey nests and coral reefs, all free and always running.
An idle game built on actual differential equations, with optional theory levels that teach you the mathematics as you climb.
- 1 hr+
NASA's real-time 3D model of every mission in flight, letting you ride along with a probe on its actual trajectory.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Home of the GROW games, where you choose an order for a handful of objects and then watch a tiny world assemble or fail.
- 2 min
- Desktop
Ugly, ancient, and still better than everything else at cutting, resizing, reversing and optimising a GIF.
- 2 min
FactNet
AltFShort, sourced facts arranged so one leads into the next. Built for the specific pleasure of learning something you can repeat.
- 10 min
Full-screen fake update screens for every operating system, including the blue one, with a bar that never finishes.
- <1 min
- Desktop
Three infinite layers of colour falling forever over a low drone, from the net artist behind half the web's cult toys.
- <1 min
- Sound on
Accurately drawn birds swearing at each other about territory, mating and the general indignity of being a bird.
Build a circuit and watch current move through it as coloured dots, with an oscilloscope available on any node.
- 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.