The privacy opt-out process shouldn't be this complicated. A recent account of trying to opt out of Flock — a license plate surveillance company — illustrates what signing up for services actually means: you're not handing over your email for convenience. You're entering a database that may take real effort to leave.
Most of us have absorbed this reality and still keep signing up, because the tools we rely on demand it. But a surprising number of useful free online tools have skipped the account system entirely. Not out of principle — just because the tool is simple enough to run in your browser tab without needing to know who you are. You open a URL, do the thing, close the tab. No account, no registration, no trail.
Here are three free browser tools that operate this way. They're all genuinely useful, all no-login required, and all flying well under the radar.
tmp.tf: A Clipboard That Lives in a URL
Cross-device copy-paste is a solved problem in theory. In practice it's still surprisingly awkward. AirDrop is Apple-only. Emailing yourself works but adds noise to your inbox and leaves a timestamped record of what you moved. Cloud notes apps — Notion, Apple Notes, Google Keep — all require a signed-in account, and you've got to find the right note afterward.
tmp.tf does this better. Open the page, paste any text, and get a short unique URL. Open that URL on your phone, your colleague's laptop, or any other device, and the text is waiting. No account, no download needed, no install required. It takes about ten seconds from "I need this text somewhere else" to "it's there."
The temporary design matters more than it might seem. Your clipboard content doesn't stick around indefinitely — it's meant to be used and forgotten. That's the right behavior for a quick text transfer. You don't want a permanent server-side copy of every snippet you've moved between devices.
The privacy comparison to the obvious alternative — a Google Doc — is sharp. A Google Doc technically works as a temporary clipboard, but it attaches the content to your Google account, generates an entry in your Drive history, and sits there until you manually delete it. tmp.tf generates no such record. There's no account associated with the text, no activity log, no user ID. The URL is the clipboard.
For anyone who regularly moves text between a desktop and a phone — snippets, addresses, URLs, passwords for a session — tmp.tf becomes reflexive. It's in the same category as tools you forget you're using because they just work.
If you want to see how many other everyday workflow problems have no-login solutions, the nologin.tools directory is a good place to browse.
led.run: Turn Any Screen Into a Display Board Without Installing Anything
Most tools for displaying text on a large screen require either a mobile app with an account or presentation software with a subscription. The underlying task — "show this text in big letters on that screen" — shouldn't need any of that.
led.run cuts straight to the job. Open it in any browser, type your text, and go full screen. The text renders in a high-contrast LED-style display, readable at a distance, with options for scrolling, size, font, and color. That's the whole tool.
The actual use cases are more varied than the description suggests. Workshop facilitators display break timers on a projector without opening PowerPoint. Conference organizers put a welcome message on a lobby monitor. Game night hosts put a running score on the TV. Twitch streamers drop it as a lightweight text overlay. Teachers show short prompts or countdown timers to a class without dealing with slides.
What separates led.run from just enlarging text in a text editor is the display optimization. The high contrast, the choice of LED-style fonts, the full-screen behavior tuned for readability from across a room — these details matter when you're trying to communicate something to people who aren't sitting at your keyboard. Plus it's URL-shareable: you can send someone a link with your message pre-loaded, and they open it ready to display.
Is There Anything Comparable That Requires No Signup?
Most alternatives are mobile apps with accounts attached. Presentation tools like Google Slides work for this, but require a Google account and more setup than the task warrants. For situations where you need big text on a screen right now, without setting anything up, led.run has no obvious equal.
No login required. No install. No registration. Just a tab.
til.re: Share Any Moment in Time as a URL
Remote-work scheduling coordination is an unsolved daily friction. "3pm my time" is ambiguous for anyone in a different timezone, and even tools designed for timezone comparison — like the very good WorldTimeBuddy — require everyone to do a little math and agree on what they calculated.
til.re takes a slightly different approach. Instead of showing what time it is in different cities, it lets you share a moment as a URL. The person who opens that URL sees how much time is left until that moment, or how long ago it passed — automatically, with no timezone calculation on their end.
You pick a date and time, til.re generates a short URL encoding that moment. Send the URL to whoever needs it. When they open it, the countdown is already running. They don't need to know your timezone. They don't need to convert anything. The moment is the same moment for everyone.
This turns out useful in more situations than the description implies:
- "The release goes live in 47 minutes" as a link in a Slack message is more useful than "at 2pm Pacific"
- Deadline reminders for distributed teams where time zones span continents
- Product launch countdowns you can paste into a README or team channel
- Event timing when the attendees are spread across multiple countries
Like tmp.tf, the technical approach here is worth understanding. The time data is encoded directly in the URL itself, which means the countdown works without any server infrastructure once the link is generated. No account, no registration, and no dependency on the service staying online to serve the data — the URL is self-contained.
For remote workers who regularly coordinate across time zones, til.re is the kind of tool that earns a permanent tab in your "daily tools" browser window.
Why These Three Work Without Accounts
| Tool | Problem it solves | Requires signup? | Data stored? |
|---|---|---|---|
| tmp.tf | Cross-device text transfer | No | Temporarily, then deleted |
| led.run | Full-screen display text | No | No |
| til.re | Shareable countdowns | No | In the URL itself |
All three are narrow by design. They solve specific problems and don't try to grow into platforms. That's not an accident — it's the only architecture that works without accounts. A general-purpose tool needs to track your history, your preferences, your files. A single-purpose tool just needs to do the one thing and let you leave.
The account-free design is also the reason these tools survive long-term. There's no monetization pressure to introduce a freemium tier, no enterprise features that require login, no user data to manage or (eventually) breach. Tools that never collected data don't have the liability of a breach. The EFF's Surveillance Self-Defense guide puts it plainly: the safest data is data that was never collected.
Compare this to the pattern with surveillance-adjacent services. When someone tries to opt out of a facial recognition database, the friction is intentional. The data has commercial value, so the process of removing yourself is designed to be difficult. Tools like these don't have that problem. You can't opt out of a database that doesn't exist.
For a practical test of how much your browser currently shares without your explicit consent, BrowserLeaks runs a full fingerprinting audit and shows you exactly what third-party scripts can infer about your device, fonts, and behavior. Worth running once.
The Case for Tools That Stay Small
There's a quiet tendency to undervalue tools this minimal. No product blog, no Series B announcement, no compelling onboarding flow. They're just URLs that do things.
But minimal tools have a structural advantage: they don't break. No account system to migrate. No feature roadmap adding complexity users didn't ask for. No monetization strategy that eventually requires changing the thing you were relying on.
The web has a long history of tools that were useful, then grew, then required login, then added pricing tiers, then got acquired, then disappeared. tmp.tf, led.run, and til.re are all counterexamples to that pattern. Each does a specific job. None collects data. And each is the kind of tool you can explain to someone in one sentence without a tutorial.
That's rarer than it sounds, and worth paying attention to when you find it.
For more tools that follow this pattern — no registration, no download, no account — the free tools hidden gems roundup has a different set of picks. The pattern is the same: browser tab, no signup, does the job.
The ones you keep using are the ones that get out of your way.
