PART 1 Every Free App Worth Using

Affinity Affinity was already Adobe's biggest challenger. Instead of paying every month for Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign, you bought Affinity Photo, Designer and Publisher once and own them forever. Then in 2024, Canva bought Serif. The company behind Affinity. Normally, that's the exact moment a subscription appears. And everyone collectively sighs. Instead, in 2025, Canva merged the three apps into one program simply called Affinity and made it completely free on Windows and Mac, with an iPad version coming later. Not a free trial, not a stripped-down version. Professional software. Inside one app, you switch between photo editing, vector design and page layout. The jobs normally handled by Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. For designers, freelancers, students and small businesses. That software worth roughly $660 a year. Or nearly $780 if you were paying for the full Creative Cloud suite. There are a couple of caveats. A paid Canva Pro account unlocks the newest AI features and a few highly specialized Adobe plugin workflows still favor Adobe. But for almost everyone else, this is one of the biggest shakeups in creative software in years. Adobe spent a decade convincing people that renting creative tools every month was normal. Affinity looked at that idea and dropped the price to zero. ProtonVPN. Public Wi-Fi is one of those things everyone uses and nobody really trusts. Airports, coffee shops, hotels. You're connecting to a network shared with hundreds of strangers. And your traffic is passing through something you don't control. That's why ProtonVPN's got popular. Unfortunately, it's also why the internet is full of free VPNs that promise privacy while secretly making money from your data. That makes Proton VPN different. It's built by the same privacy-focused team behind Proton Mail. Follows a strict no-logs policy and operates under Switzerland's strong privacy laws. In other words, it isn't secretly keeping a diary of everything you do online. The real surprise is the free plan. Most free VPNs give you a few gigabytes a month before informing you that privacy now costs extra. Proton VPN gives you unlimited data, free forever. No cap, no trial countdown, no feeling that your privacy expires after three YouTube videos. Free users can connect through servers in around 10 countries, including the US, Canada, Japan, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Singapore. More than enough for everyday browsing and staying protected on public Wi-Fi. The free plan does have limits. One device at a time. It auto-picks the fastest server. And premium perks like streaming unlocks and top speeds are paywalled. But for everyone else, it's a small compromise. Considering NordVPN and ExpressVPN can run $60-100 a year. Proton VPN replaces one of the internet's most heavily advertised subscriptions without charging a cent. Most free VPNs sell the data they promise to protect. Proton VPN chose the much stranger business model of actually protecting it. Bitwarden. Password manager. If you like that idea, but immediately thought, "I want my passwords to just appear on all my devices," this one's for you. Meet Bitwarden. If your current system involves using the same password everywhere, adding an exclamation point when a site demands something stronger, or keeping everything in a notes file called "Passwords (Definitely Don't Open)", we need to talk. Bitwarden is a free, open-source password manager that stores unlimited passwords and syncs them across unlimited devices. No subscription. That's the exact feature most competitors put behind a paywall. And here it's included from day one. It also supports passkeys, stores payment cards and addresses, autofills logins and includes two-step login. Its code is publicly auditable and it uses zero-knowledge encryption. Your vault is locked before it ever reaches Bitwarden servers. So even the company can't read what's inside. Trade-off. Because it's cloud-synced, you're still trusting Bitwarden to host it. If you want complete offline ownership, KeePassXC is still the better pick. But for everyone else, Bitwarden is hardly beat. 1Password offers no free plan at all. LastPass has grown more restrictive while carrying the baggage of multiple high-profile breaches. PDF24 Creator. PDFs are supposed to make documents easier to share. Instead, they've become one of the internet's greatest sources of frustration. Merge two files, pay. Split a document, pay. Compress one file so it fits in an email, somehow also pay. Adobe looked at one of the world's most common file formats and found about 30 ways to put basic buttons behind a subscription. That's where PDF24 Creator comes in. Made by a German company with a strong privacy focus. It's completely free. No feature limits, no premium tier, no countdown expiring right before your deadline. And it does far more than its name suggests. You can merge, split, convert to PDF, and from PDF. Run OCR, scan pages, add signatures, password protect files, remove passwords, rearrange pages and edit. All from one toolkit. The desktop version works entirely offline. So your files stay on your computer instead of being uploaded to some random server. It won't match every enterprise workflow in Adobe Acrobat Pro DC. Adobe charges around $155-240/yr for Acrobat Pro. PDF24 does what 95% of people actually need for free. Absolutely nothing. LocalSend. For reason, moving a file between two devices is still harder than it should be. iPhone to iPhone, easy. Droid to Android, fine. But the second you involve Windows, a Mac or anything outside the same ecosystem, people start emailing files to themselves or digging out a USB drive to move one photo. That's exactly why LocalSend exists. The easiest way to describe it: imagine AirDrop, except it doesn't care what devices you're using. LocalSend is a free, open-source app that works on Windows, Mac OS, Linux, Android and iPhone. As long as both devices need to be on the same network. So it won't replace Google Drive or Dropbox for sending files across the internet. But that's not what it's for. Apple built AirDrop and mostly kept it inside Apple's walled gardens. LocalSend looked at that and said, "What if everyone else got invited too?" LocalSend is a free, open-source app that works on Windows, Mac OS, Linux, Android and iPhone. As long as both devices are on the same Wi-Fi, they discover each other automatically and send files, photos, videos. Transfers device to device over a local network using encrypted HTTPS with optional PIN verification. One limitation. Both devices generally need to be on the same network. So it won't replace Google Drive or Dropbox for sending files across the internet. But that's not what it's for. Apple built AirDrop and mostly kept it inside Apple's walled gardens. LocalSend looked at that and said, "What if everyone else got invited too?"