Time you have
Instant
No setup, no reading, no learning curve. These pay off before you have decided whether you like them.
262 sites · page 1 of 6
Disposable inbox that self-destructs after ten minutes. Exactly what you want when a download demands an email address first.
- <1 min
Fly out through a mapped model of our stellar neighbourhood until the Sun is one unremarkable dot among thousands.
- <1 min
- Desktop
The blunt one-minute word test that has served as the internet's default words-per-minute benchmark for over a decade.
- <1 min
- Desktop
Collection of period-correct cursor trails — rainbows, bubbles, snowflakes, ghosts — demoed live so you can wave the mouse about.
- <1 min
- Desktop
Ten sliders — rain, thunder, waves, birds, coffee — mixed on a single page with nothing else on it at all.
- <1 min
- Sound on
One of the oldest portals still standing, from the era when a game loading in thirty seconds counted as instant.
- <1 min
- Desktop
Unfiltered aircraft tracking, including the private jets and military flights that the commercial trackers politely agree to hide.
- <1 min
- Desktop
Be a cell, eat smaller cells, flee larger ones and split to ambush. The game that invented this entire genre in 2015.
- <1 min
Live flight tracking with airport arrival boards and playback of earlier flights, formerly known as RadarBox and still free to browse.
Botanical infinite zoom drifting through flowers, insects and quiet ruins. Best left running on a second screen.
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Norwegian classified ads laid out with no grid, no spacing and no mercy, unchanged through every redesign trend since.
- <1 min
- Desktop
Drop an asteroid of your chosen size on any address and read back the fireball, wind speed and earthquake radius it makes.
One astronomy image a day since 1995, each with a paragraph from an actual astronomer and an archive going back decades.
- <1 min
Draw a wonky shape and it offers professional illustrations of what it thinks you meant. Ruthlessly effective on anyone who cannot draw.
- <1 min
A cheerful cartoon avatar generator in one fixed illustration style, endlessly recombined and free to use anywhere.
- <1 min
A straightforward cartoon portrait builder with vector output, useful for when a real profile photo is genuinely not an option.
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Lorem ipsum made entirely of cured meats, for mock-ups where nobody was going to read the filler text anyway.
- <1 min
A company worth hundreds of billions serves a homepage of plain blue links, unchanged since the 1990s and quietly proud of it.
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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
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
Ben Eater's flocking simulation with the three rules exposed as sliders, so you can break the flock deliberately.
- <1 min
- Desktop
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
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
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
Type any web feature and see which browsers support it, version by version, alongside how many people actually use each one.
- <1 min
- Desktop
Turns a snippet of code into a tidy image with your choice of theme, font and window frame. The tool behind a lot of shared code screenshots.
- <1 min
- Desktop
Cut-out cats rain down and bounce off the bottom of the screen, and you can grab one and fling it at the others.
- <1 min
- Desktop
A chihuahua rotating to a dance track, which was apparently a complete website idea in 2013 and somehow still is.
- <1 min
- Sound on
The offline dinosaur from Chrome's error page, playable while you still have a perfectly good connection.
- <1 min
Paint over the tourist, the bin or the power line and it fills in whatever should have been behind them.
- <1 min
Curated stumble button that sends you somewhere good rather than somewhere random, with categories if you are feeling fussy.
The murmur of a café without the queue or the cost, built on research that moderate background noise helps creative work.
- <1 min
- Sound on
Hand-picked four-colour palettes posted daily and sorted by mood, with none of a generator's randomness.
- <1 min
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
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.
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The same premise with different flavours of damage — choose the format and how thoroughly you want it ruined.
- <1 min
The biggest browser arcade going, with genuinely decent HTML5 ports and a search that mostly finds the game you meant.
- <1 min
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
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
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.
Instant: questions
How many sites are in the instant list?
262 sites, each hand-sorted by category, mood and how long it takes to pay off. 4 of them are AltF originals that run right here.
Which of these sites are free with no sign-up?
262 of the 262 are free and need no account. None of them are paid.
Do these sites work on a phone, and are they safe for work?
181 of 262 work on a phone; the rest are desktop only. 262 are safe for work and 214 work with the sound off.