You Won’t Need These Today. You Will On a Bad Day.

There is a particular kind of afternoon that every person who makes things online eventually has. An update lands and the editor you have used for two years no longer opens your project file. An email arrives saying a service you signed up for in 2021 has been breached. A brand asks you to prove what a page said three months ago and the page now says something else. You need to speak to a human at a company and the phone menu has nine options, none of which is a human.

The reel this post is built on lists ten free websites for exactly those afternoons. The line that makes it worth writing about is the last one: you won’t need these today, but you will on a bad day. That is not a throwaway. It is the whole argument. Most tool lists ask you to change how you work. This one asks for nothing at all — until the day it saves you three hours, and on that day you will not be in a state to go looking.

So this article is organised around the bad day, not around the tool. Below, each site sits next to the specific bad afternoon it fixes, and the ten are split into two groups that behave very differently: the ones that work whenever you open them, and the two that only work if you did something in advance. Those two are the ones people skip, and they are the ones that matter most.

We have already covered these ten sites once, as a bookmark folder and a set of research habits, in Ten Quiet Websites That Belong In Your Bookmark Folder. This is the same ten, sorted by a different question. If you want the tour, read that one. If you want the triage list, stay here.

The five bad days, and what each one needs

The three you can do in the next five minutes

The reel picks out three of the ten as immediate. That is the right call, because all three take less time than reading this paragraph twice, and all three leave you better off whether or not the bad day ever arrives.

Have I Been Pwned is a search box. You type an email address and it tells you which known data breaches that address appeared in, with dates. It is not a scan of your computer and it does not fix anything — it hands you a list. The useful part is the ordering: the oldest breach tells you which password you have probably been reusing for the longest. Start there.

JustDelete.me is a directory of the direct account-deletion link for hundreds of services, rated by how hard the company makes it. If you make videos, you have signed up for more services than you remember: the trial you took for one thumbnail, the transcription tool you used for a single interview, the newsletter platform you abandoned. Each of those is an address, a password and a payment method sitting somewhere. The directory does not delete anything for you. It saves you the twenty minutes of hunting through settings menus that were designed to be hunted through.

GetHuman publishes the specific sequence — press 0, then 4, then wait for the second menu — that gets you to a person at a given company, plus the typical wait. It is crowd-reported, so it is right more often than it is wrong and occasionally out of date. Treat it as a good first guess rather than a guarantee.

All ten, sorted by the afternoon they rescue

The two that only work if you acted first

Here is the part the list format hides. Eight of these ten are reactive: the bad day arrives, you open the site, you are fine. Two are not. They are the ones that look least urgent on a good day and cost you the most on a bad one.

The Wayback Machine has a Save Page Now box. Everyone knows the archive as a place to look things up. Far fewer people use it as a place to put things. If you are quoting a pricing page, a policy, a competitor’s claim or a platform announcement in a video, paste that URL into Save Page Now before you write the script. It takes about fifteen seconds. Six months later, when the page has quietly changed and a comment accuses you of making the number up, you have a timestamped capture with a permanent link. Without that step, the archive can only show you what somebody else happened to capture — and for a small pricing page, that is often nothing.

OldVersion needs you to know which version worked. The site hosts older builds of well-known desktop software. It is genuinely useful the day an update changes an export setting or drops a codec. But it only helps if you can name the build you want, and nobody remembers that under pressure. The five-minute job on a good day is to write the current version number of the two or three programs your whole workflow depends on into a plain text note. Editor, screen recorder, audio cleaner. That note is the difference between a twenty-minute rollback and an afternoon lost.

There is a wider habit here that has nothing to do with these particular websites. Every workflow has a small number of dependencies that are invisible until they break. Writing them down — versions, logins, the one plugin that does the thing — is the cheapest insurance in this job.

Four honest caveats

A breach check is a lookup, not protection. Have I Been Pwned can only report breaches that have been collected and published. An empty result means nothing known, not nothing happened. The action it should trigger is changing reused passwords, not relief.

Deletion directories go stale. Companies move and rename their cancellation pages. If a link sends you to a generic help centre, the entry is out of date — that is not the service refusing you, and you still have the right to ask for your account and data to be removed.

An archive capture is evidence, not permission. Saving a page proves what it said. It does not give you the right to republish the whole of it. Quote briefly, credit clearly, and link to the capture rather than lifting the content.

Free with no sign-up is a state, not a promise. The card was marked as checked in September 2026 and that matches what we found. Free tiers change, and a saved list rots quietly. We have written about exactly how that happens, at scale, in Sixty AI Tools, Thirteen Were Wrong — and about paying twice for things you already own in Stop Paying Twice: The Overlap Audit.

Why this makes a good video, and a better one

Ten-site lists perform because they are easy to save and cost nothing to watch. They underperform as channels because the saves rarely turn into anything. The fix is the one this card already stumbled onto: separate the items by when the viewer can act. Three now, two in advance, five when needed. That single sort turns a list into an instruction, and an instruction is what people come back for.

If you are building a channel on tools, the same logic applies to how much access you hand software — start read-only and widen slowly, which we argued in Read-Only First.

Questions people ask

Do I need an account for any of these? No. All ten open and work without signing up, which is the main reason they belong in a bad-day kit — the last thing you want mid-crisis is a registration form.

Is it safe to type my email into a breach checker? Typing an address you already give out publicly into a well-known breach service is a normal thing to do. Never type a password into one, and treat any site that asks for a password in order to “check” it as a site to close.

How long does the advance work take? Archiving a page is about fifteen seconds. Writing down three version numbers is about two minutes. That is the whole cost.

What if the site I need is not on the list? The categories matter more than the names: proof of what a page said, a route to a human, a way back to a version that worked, a way out of an account. Find your own equivalent for each and the kit still works.

Do the five minutes today

Nobody reads a preparedness article and then goes and prepares. So make it small enough that you cannot reasonably put it off. Open the breach checker and type your main address. Open the archive and save the one page you are currently quoting. Write three version numbers into a note. That is it — you are done, and the bad day, when it arrives, is now an inconvenience rather than an afternoon.

Learning a lot does not make anyone good. Doing a lot does.

If you want to be pushed into doing rather than saving, we run a free challenge — there is no barrier to entry, only a commitment fee that is refunded when you finish. It exists because people who commit to a deadline finish, and people who bookmark do not.

Which of the ten did you already have bookmarked, and which one did you not know existed? Tell us in the comments under the original reel.

More on building a channel for a global audience at mmoyoutube.com.