About
FreeUsefulApps.ca is a small collection of tools we originally built to solve our own everyday annoyances. Each one does a single job, runs in your browser, and doesn't ask you to sign up, pay, or hand over any personal info to use it. This page explains who's behind the site and how it pays for itself; what it collects is set out in full on the privacy page.
Who makes these, and why they're free
The site is run by one person in Canada who would rather not put their name on the internet. That's the only thing we're keeping to ourselves though, since everything about what the tools do and what they send is written out on this site. If you send a message through the contact page, it goes straight to that same person.
Most tools start the same way: something annoys us, the fix turns out to be small, so we build it and put it here. They cost almost nothing to host, and ads and donations cover what little they do cost.
Some of the tools are a single HTML file you can save. That way they work on any device, keep working offline, and can't change on you without you knowing. Other tools can't work like that because they need live data (a sports schedule, for example), so those run on this site instead and are clearly labelled. If a tool breaks, let us know and we'll either fix it or mark the page as unmaintained.
How this site pays for itself
Ads and one-off donations, that's it.
| Ads | We use Google AdSense, but we've set it up to be as unobtrusive as we could. There's one ad per page at most, sitting at the very bottom above the footer in a dashed box labelled “Advertisement — not a download”, and never next to a download button. This page doesn't have any, and neither do the other pages where the site explains itself rather than earns — contact, privacy, terms and What's a PWA. Ads are set to non-personalised everywhere (not just where the law requires it), and we've switched off Google's automatic placement and pop-over formats, so you won't get pop-ups, bars stuck to the edge of your screen, or ads between pages. We also don't show ads at all in the UK, Switzerland or the EEA, since doing so would mean putting a consent pop-up in front of you. To figure that out, we check where your connection appears to be coming from and what timezone your device is set to, and if either one looks European, no ad loads. The cookie section on the privacy page covers what AdSense sets when an ad does load. |
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| Donations | If a tool saved you an afternoon and you're in a position to, you can make a one-off contribution of whatever amount you like. There's no account needed, no monthly option or membership, and nothing gets unlocked by paying. Payment is handled on Stripe's own page, nothing from Stripe loads on this site, and we never see your card details. This isn't a charity so there's no tax receipt, it's really just chipping in for someone who makes free tools rather than a donation in the legal sense. If a tool didn't help you, or money's tight, please just keep using it for free. |