A curated directory of 100% free developer tools, infrastructure, and services — hosting, databases, DNS, email APIs, and AI coding assistants.

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Tools live in SQLite, not in the HTML. The page fetches them at runtime, so adding an entry is a form submission rather than a code change.

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The admin UI is at /admin.html (not linked from the public site, and marked noindex).

Writes require an authenticated Val Town session and are restricted server-side to the username configured in the encrypted ADMIN_VAL_USERNAME environment variable. The browser does not store or send a reusable admin credential. Reads remain public.

The authorized account is configured with ADMIN_VAL_USERNAME; do not expose this value in client-side code.

Validation happens server-side (validate() in db.ts): name and description required, URL must be a valid absolute http(s) URL, tier must be one of the three known values, at least one category required. Names are unique case-insensitively. Failures return 400 with a human-readable message, 409 on a duplicate name.

CREATE TABLE tools (
  id          INTEGER PRIMARY KEY AUTOINCREMENT,
  name        TEXT NOT NULL,
  cats        TEXT NOT NULL,        -- comma-separated category ids
  tier        TEXT NOT NULL,
  icon        TEXT NOT NULL,        -- Lucide icon name
  url         TEXT NOT NULL,
  description TEXT NOT NULL,
  code_label  TEXT,                 -- optional invite/referral code
  code_value  TEXT,
  sort_order  INTEGER NOT NULL,
  created_at  TEXT NOT NULL,
  updated_at  TEXT NOT NULL
);

cats is a comma-separated string rather than a join table — at directory scale it saves ceremony, and filtering happens client-side anyway.

Categories: dns, comms, ai, edge, paas, db. A tool may belong to several (Wasmer.io is both edge and paas), and it then appears under each of those pills.

Tiers: Forever Free (green), Free Tier (blue), Open Source (violet).

The optional code field renders a click-to-copy chip on the card, and its value is included in the search index — so pasting ESB9EDBVDE into the search bar finds DNSHE.

• Live search across name, description, tier, category labels, and code values
• Category pills with live counts, plus a Saved filter backed by localStorage
• Bookmarks — star any card; persists across reloads
• Click-to-copy for both the tool URL and any invite code
• Keyboard: / focuses search, Esc clears it
• Loading, error-with-retry, and empty states

db.ts seeds from seed-data.ts on first run, only when the tools table is empty. Editing seed-data.ts afterwards has no effect on a populated database — use the admin UI, or call resetSeed() (destructive: wipes the table and re-inserts the original 26).

The repo at github.com/vijevira/devfreestack is a mirror, not the source of truth — the val is.

publish-to-github.ts syncs this val's files to the repo. Click Run: it walks every file, compares each against what's on GitHub, and creates one atomic commit containing all changes. It also removes remote files that no longer exist in the val. Safe to re-run whenever you edit the directory here; if nothing changed, no commit is created.

Requires a GITHUB_TOKEN environment variable with write access to the repo — classic token with repo scope, or a fine-grained token with Contents: Read and write.

👉 Add GITHUB_TOKEN here: https://www.val.town/x/vijevira/devfreestack/environment-variables?key=GITHUB_TOKEN

Optional overrides: GITHUB_REPO (defaults to vijevira/devfreestack) and GITHUB_BRANCH (defaults to the repo's default branch).

One thing it deliberately does not do:

• It never publishes itself. publish-to-github.ts is in the sync's skip list, so the repo contains only the project.

Suggestions arrive as GitHub issues filed through .github/ISSUE_TEMPLATE/suggest-a-tool.yml. The form's fields mirror the database schema (name, url, cats[], tier, description, code), so accepting one is a copy-paste into the admin UI rather than a transcription job. Issues land labelled suggestion.

Three entry points on the site link to it:

There is no in-app form and no suggestion database. Moderation, spam handling, notifications and threaded discussion are all GitHub's job, which is the whole reason for going this route.

Some outbound links carry referral or invite parameters (?r=, ?referralCode=, invite codes). They cost the visitor nothing and never change what a tool's free tier includes — the directory only ever lists tools that are genuinely free to use.

Free tiers change constantly. Every vendor's current terms are the source of truth — this directory links out rather than mirroring pricing pages.

Built for developers who love free infrastructure.