Guide: Download Free Stuff From Favorite Websites
“What are some cool websites where you can download free stuff?” asked redditor howtoadvanced. He got over 5,000 answers. We’ve gone through and categorized the best ones, identifying each resource. You could spend the rest of your life just entertaining and educating yourself with the free books, music, games, apps, and other freebies available on the sites listed here. (Don’t go cancelling your Netflix, but maybe stop paying Amazon for books that Project Gutenberg hands out for free.)
Unless noted (and with the possible exception of some “abandonware” sites) these are legal and legitimate resources, but some are only for personal use. Always check before you use a resource ccommercially or publicly.
Books
Data
(special thanks to redditor chinchalinchin)
- Quandl: Free and paid financial data
- American FactFinder: Searchable data from the U.S. census
- Last10K.com: SEC filings, including annual and quarterly reports
- BEA: Economic data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis
- NASA’s Open Data Portal: Every public NASA dataset
- OECD Data: International economic data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
- Sexualitics: Performance data from a large portion of uploads to porn sites xHamster and Xnxx
- Project EUCLID: Mathematics papers
- arXiv.org: Academic papers in the sciences
- Vertex42: Spreadsheet templates for Excel and Google Sheets
Video Games
Design and Art
- Resource Cards: Catalog of free resources including stock photos, icons, and tools for Photoshop, Boostrap, WordPress, web development, and SEO
- Unsplash, Pixabay, Pexels, FreeImages, and Stockio: Free stock photos, all suggested by redditor NerdFerby.
- Librestock: Metasearch that combines several of the above image libraries
- Awesome Images: A list of over 30 more image libraries
- Subtle Patterns: Background pattern images
- Placeholder.com: Simple placeholder images marked with their width and height, at any measurement
- Flaticon, Iconfinder, Noun Project, and Font Awesome: Free and paid icon sets
- DaFont, Font Squirrel, and Google Fonts: Downloadable and embeddable fonts
- Lost Type Co-op: Small collection of pay-what-you-want fonts
- Creative Market: Cheap and free design elements
- Loading.io: Customizable loading animations
Development
Music
Apps
Etc.
- XOWA: Download all of Wikipedia
- Archive.org: A motherlode of collections of music, videos, images, games, and written materials from non-profits, schools, government organizations, and the public domain. See top collections on the front page. Also home to the Wayback Machine.
- NYPL Digital Collections: Digitized ephemera from the New York Public Library
- Library of Congress Digital Collections: Digitized ephemera from the Library of Congress
- Library of Babel: Technically contains every book up to a certain length—because it contains every combination of characters, almost all of them gibberish, only generated the moment you load the page
- Textfiles: Collection of old online text files, under categories like Conspiracy, Ham Radio, and Science Fiction.
- #ColorOurCollections: Black and white drawings from museums and libraries, suggested as printable coloring books
- Hubble Space Telescope: Images of space from NASA’s orbiting telescope
- OpenLearn: Free online academic courses
- No Excuse List: Catalog of free online courses, how-to guides, and and educational sites
- CommonLit: Reading passages, lessons, and other literary education tools for teachers
- Cheatography: Cheat sheets, mostly for software
- Lego Building Instructions: Building instructions for every Lego set
- Ana White: Woodworking plans
- Cubeecraft: Patterns for paper-folding models
- Thingiverse: 3D models that you can print on your own 3D printer (or a rental or library model)
Basically Just Pirating
Probably illegal. Proceed with caution and/or guilt.
Find more free (and legal) resources at allOPEN.org, a collection curated by redditor corydave.
