Every developer has a list of tools they'd fight to keep if their machine got wiped tomorrow. This is mine — nine free tools that quietly save hours a week, whether you're a solo dev, part of a small team, or working inside a website development company juggling multiple client projects at once.
None of these cost a cent. All of them have earned a permanent spot in my workflow.
1. Raycast (or Alfred on older setups)
A launcher that replaces Spotlight and about five other apps you didn't know you needed. Clipboard history, snippet expansion, window management, and a plugin store full of dev-focused extensions (GitHub PR search, npm lookups, color pickers). Once you build muscle memory for it, tabbing through Finder or digging for an app icon feels prehistoric.
Time saved: roughly 20–30 minutes a day in app-switching and repetitive typing.
2. Biome
If your team is still running ESLint and Prettier separately, Biome is worth a look. It's a single Rust-based tool that lints and formats JavaScript and TypeScript, and it's dramatically faster than the two-tool setup it replaces. For a website development company shipping multiple client codebases, standardizing on one fast formatter across repos cuts down on CI wait time and "why does this file look different" PR comments.
Time saved: minutes per commit, hours per week across a team.
3. Ruff
The Python equivalent of Biome. It replaces flake8, isort, and pyflakes with a single binary that runs 10–100x faster. If any part of your stack touches Python — scripts, data pipelines, backend services — this is close to a free performance upgrade for your entire team's feedback loop.
4. Postman (free tier) or Bruno
API testing without leaving a GUI. Bruno is worth a mention here too — it's open source, stores collections as plain files (so they diff nicely in git), and skips the cloud-sync friction some teams don't want. Either way, having a saved, shareable collection of API calls beats re-writing curl commands from memory every time someone joins a project.
5. Excalidraw
Free, browser-based, and genuinely fast for sketching system diagrams, onboarding flows, or architecture decisions mid-conversation. It has become the de facto whiteboard for a lot of remote engineering teams because there's zero setup — just open a tab and start drawing.
Time saved: entire meetings that used to end in "let me draw this up later" now end with a shared link.
6. TLDR pages
tldr is a community-driven alternative to man pages — simplified, example-based documentation for common CLI commands. Instead of parsing a wall of flags to remember how tar extraction works, you get three copy-pasteable examples. Small tool, but it removes a surprising number of context switches to the browser.
7. HTTPie
A friendlier curl. Readable syntax, sane defaults (JSON handling out of the box), and colored output that makes debugging API responses less painful. If you're constantly testing endpoints from the terminal, this alone will save you from googling curl flag syntax for the hundredth time.
8. GitHub CLI (gh)
Creating PRs, checking CI status, and reviewing issues without leaving the terminal. For anyone who context-switches between an editor and a browser tab all day, cutting that loop down adds up fast — especially across a busy sprint.
9. Zed or VS Code with a trimmed-down extension list
This one's less about which editor and more about discipline: audit your extensions every few months. A bloated extension list slows startup, eats memory, and — ironically — costs you time instead of saving it. Zed is worth trying if you want something fast by default; VS Code is fine too if you actually prune what you install.
The bigger picture
None of these tools are flashy. They won't show up in a "top AI tools of 2026" roundup. But collectively, they remove dozens of small frictions — the kind that don't feel expensive in the moment but add up to real hours by Friday. That's especially true for teams at a website development company, where the same setup gets reused across client after client, and a 10-minute daily saving per developer multiplies fast across a roster of projects.
What's on your list? I'm always looking to swap one of these out for something better.
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