Foundry Virtual Tabletop is software for running tabletop role-playing games online, where a game master hosts the table and players join free through a web browser. It is sold once, with no subscription, by a small Spokane studio whose founder has publicly refused to build generative AI into it.
The look
The illustration look, done properly
Sites carried by original drawing rather than photography or chrome.
16 sites · every one earned it
Coque Chic is a French guide to good-looking phone cases at low prices, sorted by handset model and by style. It invents no star ratings, stamps every price with the day it was checked, and says plainly that the cases are judged from photos rather than in hand.
Gamma turns a prompt or a rough outline into a finished presentation, website or social post — design work for people who are not designers. The San Francisco company behind it crossed $100M in annual revenue with roughly 50 employees and no sales team.
LoLdle sets League of Legends players one champion to identify each day, from clues, a quote, an ability icon or a sliver of splash art. It is a one-person fan project made under Riot's fan-content policy with no Riot involvement, and esports sites now publish its answers every morning.
KeepTradeCut tracks what dynasty fantasy football players are worth, from rankings crowdsourced from the managers who actually trade them. Nothing is paywalled, since charging for a crowdsourced resource would be silly, but the full board stays hidden until a visitor ranks three players.
Nitro Type is a free browser game where students build typing speed by racing each other through short passages. Built in 2011 by the team behind Typing.com, it ships with no player chat at all — a deliberate omission that keeps it in classrooms.
Your Texas Benefits is the state portal where Texans apply for food, cash and health assistance and manage an open case. Texas Health and Human Services runs it, and a single application covers SNAP, TANF, Medicaid and CHIP — the prescreening tool comes first, before any account is required.
Zumper is a rental marketplace for apartments and houses across the US and Canada. Every month it distills over a million active listings into a National Rent Report, which is where much of the press gets the median rent figure it quotes.
Givebutter is fundraising and donor-management software for nonprofits, from one-page donation forms to ticketed events. With optional donor tips switched on it charges nothing at all — those tips are the whole business model, and the company was profitable on them before its first big raise.
BetterHelp matches people with a licensed therapist and keeps the whole relationship online, by message, phone or video. Teladoc Health bought the company in 2015 for $3.5 million in cash, and the network has since grown to more than 31,000 therapists.
Federal Student Aid is the U.S. Department of Education office behind the FAFSA form, federal grants and student loan repayment. In December 2019 it absorbed StudentLoans.gov, FSAID.ed.gov and parts of NSLDS, ending years of borrowers bouncing between four differently branded federal sites.
MagicSchool is an AI platform built for K-12 classrooms — teachers, students and district administrators. Founded by Adeel Khan, a former Denver public high school principal, it keeps the core teacher toolset free rather than behind the district contract.
DeltaMath is a math practice platform for middle and high school classrooms, with automatically graded problem sets and instant step-by-step feedback. A New York City algebra teacher wrote it in 2009 for his eleventh graders, and problems still regenerate their numbers so no two students can copy.
skribbl.io is a free browser Pictionary game where one player draws a word and everyone else races to guess it in the chat. It asks for nothing but a nickname before dropping a player into a room with strangers, and the newest post in its front-page news column is still dated November 2022.
FreeTaxUSA e-files US federal tax returns directly to the IRS for free, no matter how complicated the return is. Rental income, investments and self-employment — the situations TurboTax charges most for — all sit in the free tier, with state returns at $15.99.
Notion is the all-in-one workspace — docs, wikis, databases and now a fleet of AI agents — that replaced a stack of separate tools for millions of teams. Its hand-drawn monochrome figures did more to define the last decade's software illustration style than any brand guide.