Best new design, developer and self-hosted resources: 22 October

The directory additions from 22 October were thirty free tools and websites and ten open-source projects from GitHub. This roundup groups them into design and images, places to launch and find tools, web and developer utilities, planning, focus and calm, research and learning, and open-source tools you can host yourself. Features and pricing change, so check each tool's own page before you commit to one.

Design and images

Cleanup.pictures lets you brush over an object, person, blemish or line of text in a photo and fills the gap with AI. The free version handles unlimited images but exports are limited to 720p, and results vary on busy backgrounds. Pika is a browser-based screenshot editor that adds backgrounds, padding, shadows, device frames and annotations; free images carry a small Pika watermark, and high-resolution exports need Pro.

Untitled UI is a design system for Figma and React with hundreds of components and over 4,600 icons. The free Figma kit and open-source React components cover the essentials, while the full kit and page templates are paid. DrawKit offers illustration packs, icons and animations in a consistent hand-drawn style, with many free packs in SVG, PNG and Figma formats and a Pro membership for the full library.

For colour, UI Colors creates an eleven-step palette from one base colour in the same 50 to 950 format as Tailwind CSS, and ColorBox builds colour scales shaped with easing curves that export to Tailwind CSS, OKLCH, Swift and JSON. Clippy is a free, open-source tool for creating CSS clip-path shapes from presets you can adjust by dragging points.

Lorem Picsum gives you a placeholder photo of any size by changing the numbers in a URL, using images from Unsplash; it is meant for mockups rather than final images. Gratisography is a collection of free, high-resolution photos with a playful style that can be used in personal and commercial projects without attribution. Awwwards is a long-running showcase of creative web design, free to browse, though submitting your own site costs a fee.

Launching and finding tools

Hacker News is a community-ranked feed of links and discussions about programming, startups and science, run by Y Combinator, where makers can share what they built in a Show HN post; feedback can be blunt. Open Launch, TinyLaunch and Awesome Indie all let makers launch a product for free through a queue, with optional paid launches to skip the wait or pick a day. Their audiences are smaller than the biggest launch sites, so treat them as one channel among several. Future Tools is a free directory of AI tools curated by Matt Wolfe, with filters for category and pricing, though some listings can go out of date.

Web and developer utilities

DNS Checker looks up DNS records from dozens of public servers worldwide, so you can see whether a change has spread, and Crontab.guru explains a cron expression in plain English as you type, with the next run times. explainshell matches every flag and argument in a command line to its manual page, which is a sensible check before running a command you found online. TableConvert turns tables from Excel, CSV, HTML or JSON into Markdown, LaTeX, SQL and many other formats.

Security Headers grades a website's HTTP response headers from A+ to F, though it covers headers only, not full security, and results are public by default. PageSpeed Insights runs Lighthouse on any URL and lists Core Web Vitals with concrete suggestions. Webhook.site gives you a unique URL that captures incoming requests for testing integrations; free URLs expire after 7 days or 100 requests. VirusTotal checks a file, URL, domain or IP address against more than 70 antivirus engines and is free for personal, non-commercial use. Uploaded files are shared with the security community, so avoid sending private documents.

Planning, focus and calm

KanbanFlow combines kanban boards with a Pomodoro timer and time tracking, and the free plan includes unlimited boards and tasks, while swimlanes and reports need Premium. Coggle is a simple mind mapping tool with real-time collaboration; the free plan allows unlimited public diagrams but only three private ones. Rainy Mood plays a looping recording of rain and distant thunder in the browser, free with no sign-up, and Insight Timer offers a large free library of guided meditations, music and sleep tracks, with courses on its Member Plus subscription.

Research and learning

ZoteroBib, from the team behind Zotero, creates citations from a URL, ISBN, DOI or title in styles such as APA, MLA and Chicago, with no account or ads. Learn Git Branching teaches Git through interactive levels where you type real commands and watch the commit tree change. Google Dataset Search finds datasets published by governments, universities and data portals; quality depends on the original source, and some datasets are paywalled or outdated.

Open-source and self-hosted tools

LibreChat is a self-hosted chat app for using models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral and local providers in one place. The app is free, but you pay each provider for API usage, and setup needs a server and some technical skill. Donetick manages tasks and chores with flexible repeat schedules and rotation between people, Wallos tracks subscriptions with monthly and yearly totals and renewal reminders, and Monica is a personal relationship manager for logging birthdays, conversations and notes. Mealie manages recipes, meal plans and shopping lists for a household. Most of these need a server or Docker to run.

Reactive Resume is a private resume builder with templates and clean PDF export, on the hosted site or your own server. Sioyek is a PDF viewer for technical books and papers that previews references and figures without losing your place. Ditto is a clipboard manager for Windows only that saves text, images and HTML. Kopia takes encrypted, deduplicated incremental backups to a local drive, network share or cloud storage you choose and pay for yourself. OpenAdapt records a task done once in a web, desktop or remote app and turns it into a program you can run again; it is aimed at technical users and is still evolving quickly.

These forty additions sit alongside everything else in the directory. Browse the full Best Productivity Resources directory to compare them with other tools in each category.