Most software lists are affiliate pages wearing a blog post. This one is not. Nobody paid to be here, there are no referral links, and I get nothing if you click through.

It is a running list of software made by people who still run the thing they built. It grows as I find more.

How something gets on this list

Three rules, applied without exception:

  1. Independent. No venture funding. The people who made it still run it. That covers solo developers and small bootstrapped teams alike, and where a team is bigger than one person I say so.
  2. It works today. Actively maintained, shipping updates. Anything dormant, for sale, or coasting on an old reputation is left off, however good it used to be.
  3. You can try it without paying. A free tier, a trial without a card, or free outright.

One disclosure, because it matters: several of these compete directly with what I build. Cleanor is a site of free browser tools, and some entries below are browser tool suites doing similar jobs. They are here anyway. A list that quietly omits the competition is an ad, not a list.

Habit and health

HabitKit renders your habits as a tile grid that looks like a GitHub contribution graph, so a broken streak is visible at a glance. Tap a day to log it, backfill from the calendar, set up to three reminders per habit. Built by a solo developer in Germany. It is fully local: no account, no server, no cloud sync at all, and migrating out means exporting a JSON file. iOS, iPadOS, macOS, visionOS and Android. Freemium.

Habit Pixel takes a similar pixel-calendar approach and pushes further into journaling. You can check in multiple times a day, backfill up to five years, and attach notes, mood or a voice entry that is transcribed on the device rather than on a server. Solo developer, based in Mauritius, who prices by purchasing power so the cost differs by country. iOS, iPadOS, macOS, visionOS and Android. Freemium.

Habitify is the platform of the three. Cloud sync across everything including watchOS and web, auto-logging from Apple Health, Strava and Fitbit, group challenges, and a genuine public REST API with Zapier and IFTTT, which none of the others offer. Worth being straight about: this one is not a solo project. It is Unstatic Ltd Co in Hanoi, running since 2016, bootstrapped but a real company of roughly twenty people. Free tier covers three habits.

Waterllama is a hydration tracker that calculates a daily target from weight, activity and climate, then fills an animal silhouette as you log drinks, with a different colour band per beverage. It tracks over 150 drinks, each contributing its own hydration and calorie amount, and hands out collectible characters for streaks. It won an App Store Award in 2022 and was an Apple Design Award finalist. Also not solo: Llama Luna Apps, a small studio of around ten people, originally from Ukraine and now Canadian. Apple platforms only, no Android or web. Freemium.

Design and colour

MagicPattern is around thirty browser generators that export SVG, PNG or CSS: geometric and seamless patterns, mesh and shader gradients, blobs, waves, doodles, image noise, colour and Tailwind palettes. Unusually for a design asset tool, the paid plans grant you resale and AI training rights on what you generate, which is worth reading before you use assets commercially. Built by a solo designer and developer in Greece who left a VC-backed startup to bootstrap. Web, freemium.

Realtime Colors solves the problem that swatches lie. Instead of showing you five squares, it paints your palette onto a working demo landing page, dashboard or blog so you see the colours doing their actual job. It checks WCAG AA and AAA contrast, pairs Google Fonts, handles OKLAB and OKLCH, and exports to CSS, SCSS, Tailwind, shadcn, daisyUI, MUI and Chakra. Palettes are encoded in the URL, so sharing one is just sending a link. Built over a single weekend by a pseudonymous designer, and shipped on CodePen before it was ever a site. Free, with a Figma plugin.

One correction worth making, since it circulates: Realtime Colors has a popular GitHub repository, but it is not open source. The repo is licensed CC BY-NC-ND, which forbids derivatives, and it never contained the product source.

Browser tool suites

This is the section that competes with me. Read on.

Omatsuri bundles twelve frontend tools into an installable PWA that runs everything in-browser through web workers: CSS triangles, colour shades, gradients, page dividers, an SVG compressor, SVG to JSX, Base64, fake data, symbols, ipsum, cursors and keycodes. It is MIT licensed, free, and the README makes an explicit commitment to no ads, no analytics and no tracking. It is the side project of the developer behind Mantine, the React component library. If you check GitHub you will see a last commit from 2021 and assume it is dead; it is not, there was a TypeScript migration in February 2026 that the rendered page does not reflect.

10015.io is a broader suite spanning text, image editing, CSS generators, code formatters, colour, encoding, and PDF splitting and merging, plus social media mockup generators for fake iMessage and WhatsApp screenshots, which is an unusual thing to find inside a developer toolbox. Free and ad-supported, with Chrome and Firefox extensions. Solo frontend developer in Istanbul, running it as a side project since 2020. The name is leetspeak for TOOLS, not a count.

Writing, documents and getting things done

Inkdrop is a Markdown note app built specifically for developers: nestable notebooks, tags, task progress, a multi-cursor syntax-highlighted editor, full offline read and write that syncs when you reconnect, over a hundred plugins, and an MCP server so AI assistants can reach your notes. It is the rare tool here with no free tier at all, a flat subscription with a thirty-day trial that does not ask for a card. Solo developer in Japan. His marketing is a YouTube channel of near-silent coding vlogs, which he says brings in most of his new users.

PDF.ai lets you upload a PDF and ask questions about it, with answers grounded in the document rather than invented. It handles multiple PDFs at once, OCRs scanned files, and has grown a developer API for parsing, extracting and splitting. Bootstrapped with no funding raised. The origin is the interesting part: the founder did not build it from nothing, he bought a zero-revenue weekend project and the pdf.ai domain separately, then relaunched. The domain was most of the asset.

Super Productivity is a local-first task manager with time tracking welded in: per-task timers, timesheets, Pomodoro and time-boxing, Kanban and Eisenhower views, and two-way sync with GitHub, GitLab, Jira, CalDAV, WebDAV, Open Project and Gitea. Sync runs through accounts you already own, because there is no vendor cloud to sign up for. MIT licensed, over twenty thousand GitHub stars, and free with no paid tier whatsoever, funded only by sponsors. It has been going since 2017 and is still essentially one person writing nearly all the commits.

Why this list exists

I build software on my own and I know how little independent work gets written about honestly. Most coverage is either a press release or a ranked list optimised for a search term, and neither tells you whether a thing is maintained, who is behind it, or what it actually costs.

So the entries here say who made it, whether that is one person or twenty, what it really does, and where it is weak. If something on this list goes dormant or gets acquired, it comes off.

If you make something that fits the three rules, tell me and I will look at it properly.