Trying to limit my paid subscriptions and find free alternatives that actually work well. What are your favorite free tools?

Mine is Canva - its free version covers like 90% of what I need honestly.

Canva free is great but it’s very limited. I use Youtube free and enjoy using it but sometimes the ads are annoying. The only reason why I don’t use Youtube Premium is because it’s so expensive and I already used the lifetime duration of the student plan.

On Sep 25, 2026, Gizmo said:

Canva free is great but it’s very limited. I use Youtube free and enjoy using it but sometimes the ads are annoying. The only reason why I don’t use Youtube Premium is because it’s so expensive and I already used the lifetime duration of the student plan.

Dude, Freetube for PC!

Also GrayJay for Android.

Canva is my go-to for design. I think its free version is enough for most of my tasks. Also, I use Google Docs for writing often. Some people don't know that free tools can be very powerful if they know how to use them. I am so satisfied with all the free tools I'm using.

Canva's free tier really is hard to beat when you need a quick graphic without firing up heavy design software. Since I spend most of my day building web and mobile software, my daily free staples are VS Code, GitHub, and Postman for testing APIs.
I also rely heavily on Tailwind CSS and Obsidian for keeping all my project notes organized locally in Markdown. It is honestly amazing how far you can run a studio today on zero-dollar open-source tools.