Loom
loom.comRecord a short video instead of booking another meeting.
Curated directory · 66 tools
A hand-checked shelf of software for remote engineers, indie hackers and freelancers — async collaboration, time zones, developer utilities, content, social metadata and AI. No sponsored slots, no sign-up, no trackers.
66 tools
Record a short video instead of booking another meeting.
Docs, wikis and project boards inside one workspace.
Issue tracking fast enough that people actually keep it updated.
Team chat with searchable history, huddles and channels that outlive a project.
A whiteboard a distributed team can genuinely share and come back to.
Design, comment and hand off in the same live file.
Records and summarises your calls so nobody has to take notes.
Turns a long call into short clips you can paste into Slack.
Threaded, async discussions instead of a chat that keeps interrupting.
Low-latency screen sharing built for pairing rather than presenting.
Compare working hours across cities and get scored meeting slots instead of a grid of clocks.
Stack city clocks and read the overlap at a glance.
A booking link that ends the email back-and-forth.
Open-source scheduling you can host yourself and shape to your own flow.
Moves flexible meetings around to buy back blocks of focus time.
Defends your calendar against meeting creep and task slippage.
Auto-schedules tasks and meetings around your real deadlines.
Booking links that show your availability without exposing your whole week.
One-click time tracking for the work you actually bill.
A no-signup Pomodoro timer that stays out of the way.
Compare text or code in the browser with word-level highlighting; nothing is uploaded.
Turn a snippet into a clean code image worth posting.
Create shareable screenshots of your source with proper syntax colour.
Build, test and get a line-by-line explanation of a regular expression.
See JSON as a graph you can navigate instead of a wall of braces.
Hand-drawn diagrams for architecture and flows, fast enough to think with.
A lightweight API client that opens in a tab, not an installer.
Offline-first API client that keeps collections as plain files in your repo.
Every API reference you need, in one searchable, offline-capable place.
Sixty small developer utilities — hashes, encoders, converters — on one page.
Turns a cron expression into a plain-English sentence.
Breaks a shell command down flag by flag, with the man page behind each one.
Pre-flight check for Korean blog drafts: length, repetition, risky claims and an SEO score.
The only first-party source for how Google crawls, indexes and ranks your site.
Free crawl, backlink and keyword data for sites you can verify.
Flags the sentences that are too long, too passive or too clever.
Grammar and tone checking that follows you across every text box.
A content editor scored against the pages already ranking for the term.
Desktop crawler for titles, links and redirects; the free tier covers 500 URLs.
Keyword volumes and content ideas without sitting through a sales call.
Maps the follow-up questions people search after the first one.
Shrinks images without a quality loss you can see.
See a link card on Google, X, Slack, Discord and KakaoTalk before you publish it.
Paste any URL and see its Open Graph card rendered.
Preview and generate meta tags for Google, X, Facebook and LinkedIn.
Design dynamic OG images in code and see the result on every change.
One URL, every social card, side by side for comparison.
Write, schedule and measure posts for X and LinkedIn in one editor.
Queue the same post across every network without re-uploading it five times.
Social images that look designed, without waiting for a designer.
Free photography for the posts that need a real image, not a gradient.
Generate branded social images from a template through an API.
The general-purpose assistant most teams reach for first.
Long-context writing and code review that keeps the thread of a project.
Answers with sources you can open and check yourself.
Google's assistant, wired into Docs, Gmail and Search results.
An editor built around asking the model about your own repository.
Inline completions and a coding agent that lives inside GitHub.
Prompt a full-stack app and deploy it without leaving the browser.
Generate React and Tailwind interfaces from a description.
A cloud IDE with hosting and an agent that can run the app it writes.
An agentic IDE that keeps a working map of your codebase.
Run open models on your own machine with a single command.
Models, datasets and demos for everything open in machine learning.
Grounded answers and audio overviews built only from your own sources.
Natural text-to-speech and voice cloning for demos and narration.
Try a shorter word, another category, or clear the price filter.
Field guide · PDF
The Async Remote Playbook
The routines, written updates and decision records that let a team spread across four time zones ship without a standing meeting.
$5 Get it
Field guide · PDF
The GEO Handbook
How answers get assembled by AI search, and what to change on a small site so it is the source that gets quoted.
$5 Get it
Field guide · PDF
The Zero-Dollar Micro-SaaS Stack
The free tiers, domains and deploy path we used to put five products online with no fixed monthly cost.
$5 Get itSix shelves, sixty-six tools
Tools that let a decision happen without everyone being online at once: recorded updates, threaded docs, and boards that keep the state of the work visible.
Open shelfFinding the hour that works in three time zones, and protecting the hours that do not have a meeting in them.
Open shelfThe small browser and desktop tools that save ten minutes each time: diffs, regex, JSON, diagrams, API calls.
Open shelfWriting, checking and measuring the pages that are supposed to bring people in.
Open shelfHow a link looks when someone else pastes it, and how to make the post that carries it.
Open shelfAssistants, editors and local runners — chosen for what they are good at, not for how loud the launch was.
Open shelfPikkola Tools is built and checked by Pikkola Lab, a small independent studio. We started it because the useful part of a “best tools” list is never the ranking — it is knowing whether the free tier is enough, whether the thing still works, and what it costs once you invite a second person.
Each entry names the pricing model and the platforms it actually runs on. Entries are re-checked monthly; if a tool changes its free tier or shuts down, it is corrected or removed rather than left to rot.
Every card was written after opening the product, not generated from a description.
Nobody can buy a spot or a badge. If affiliate links are ever added, they will be marked on the card.
Static pages, no cookies, no analytics scripts, no account. Your saved list lives in your browser.
A curated directory of 66 tools for people who work remotely or build small software products: async collaboration, time zones and scheduling, developer utilities, content and SEO, social metadata, and AI. Every entry lists its pricing model and the platforms it runs on, and links straight to the product.
Two rules: we have used the tool ourselves, or we have tested the free tier we describe. Beyond that we favour tools that work without an account, keep your data in your browser where possible, and charge in a way a solo developer can afford. There are no paid slots, and no tool can buy a review.
It marks a tool built by Pikkola Lab itself — Pikkola Time, Diff, Rank and Meta. We badge them so you can tell first-party products apart from the rest of the shelf, not because they are better than the tools around them.
No. There is no sign-up, no cookie banner and no analytics script. Search, filters and bookmarks all run in your browser; the saved list is kept in local storage on your device and never sent to a server.
By the $5 field guides linked on this page, and by the other free tools Pikkola Lab builds. Placements are not for sale. If affiliate links are added later, the card will say so before you click.
Yes — email hello@pikkola.com with the name and a link. Corrections about pricing, platform support or a shutdown are the most useful messages we get, and they are usually fixed within a few days.