Every time I start a new side project I end up opening the same 20 tabs: where do I host this, which icon set, which font, how do I make a decent colour palette...

So I put together a list. Everything below is free or open source, and together it's enough to design, build and ship a web project without paying for tooling.

🚀 Hosting

  • GitHub Pages: perfect for static sites and docs, deploys straight from a repo.
  • Cloudflare Pages: fast static/JAMstack hosting with a generous free tier.
  • Netlify: drag-and-drop deploys, previews for every branch.
  • Coolify: open-source, self-hosted "Heroku/Vercel" if you have a cheap VPS.

🎨 Design & UI

  • Penpot: open-source design and prototyping tool that runs in the browser.
  • Realtime Colors: see a palette applied to a real page before you commit to it.
  • Coolors: generate palettes in seconds.

🔤 Fonts

  • Google Fonts: the obvious one, still great.
  • Fontshare: free, high-quality fonts for personal and commercial use.
  • One rule: always check the licence before you ship a font commercially.

🧩 Icons

  • Lucide: clean, consistent, open source.
  • Heroicons: pairs nicely with Tailwind.
  • Phosphor: huge set with multiple weights.

📸 Code screenshots & mockups

  • Carbon and Ray.so: turn a code snippet into something people actually stop scrolling for.

🤖 Open-source AI coding tools

  • Aider: AI pair programming in your terminal.
  • Cline and Continue: open-source AI assistants inside VS Code.
  • Bonus: because they're open source, you can swap models whenever a better one comes out.

📊 Analytics

  • Umami: simple, privacy-friendly, open-source analytics you can self-host.

Why I made this list into a site

Keeping this list up to date in a notes file stopped working, so I built Web Tools Finder, a free, curated directory of dev, AI and design tools sorted by the job you're doing (hosting, icons, fonts, UI libraries, AI tools, open source and more).

No sign-up, you can filter by free/freemium/paid, search from anywhere with Ctrl/Cmd + K, and save tools in your browser.

What's the one free tool you'd add to this list? Drop it in the comments. I'm genuinely collecting suggestions and I'll add the good ones.