Free developer tools, organised by what you're actually trying to do.
Most lists file tools under vendor categories — "CDN", "IaaS", "Tunneling". That's not how the question arrives. Mid-task you think "I need to expose localhost", and then you go hunting through ninety sections. This index is organised around that sentence instead.
Every entry carries a note saying why it's the pick or what the catch is. That note is the point; the list length isn't.
data/ is the source of truth — a taxonomy of needs plus one YAML file per tool. Astro reads it at
build time and emits static HTML: one page per need, plus a page for tools that serve several needs.
CI validates the data on every PR and deploys on every push to main.
data/needs.yml the task taxonomy
data/tools/*.yml one file per tool
src/schema/ Zod validation, shared by the hook, CI and the build
src/lib/load.ts reads and validates the data
src/pages/ index, /need/<slug>, /tool/<slug>
Adding a tool means adding one file in data/tools/. See CONTRIBUTING.md.
| Label | Means |
|---|---|
| Free | Free forever, no paid tier gating the useful part |
| Free tier | Genuinely usable free tier, paid plans above it |
| Open source | Free if you run it yourself |
| Trial only | Time-limited — shown as a warning, not a recommendation |
Each entry shows when it was last verified, and anything unverified for over a year says so plainly.
There's no nightly link-checker, deliberately. A 200 OK proves a URL resolves; it proves nothing
about whether the free tier still exists, which is the rot that actually matters. So the dates are
honest about their own age rather than automated into a promise this repo can't keep.
Spotted something stale? Open an issue.
pnpm install
pnpm dev # http://localhost:4321
pnpm test
pnpm validate