Delete Four Of These Twenty And The List Loses Nothing

A twenty-link card went round, and most of it is excellent. Photopea. Squoosh. Wolfram Alpha. Have I Been Pwned. Project Gutenberg. Open Culture. Archive.org. Genuinely useful sites that genuinely do not get the attention they deserve, and the caption has a good line about why: “Almost nobody uses them, because nobody’s advertising budget depends on you finding them.”

Then there are four entries that are not like the other sixteen, and the first of them is at number one.

Worth noting before anything else: the post text names five sites — photopea, remove.bg, wolframalpha, haveibeenpwned, archive.org — and every one of the five is from the safe sixteen. The remaining fifteen sit behind the words “fifteen more in the image.” The image also carries a different headline from the caption: on Facebook it reads “20 websites that quietly do the work you’re paying for”; on the card itself it reads “20 websites Google doesn’t want you to know about.”

Entry number one has been offline for over a year

12ft.io, described on the card as “bypass any paywall”, is the first item on the list. It has not worked since July 2025, when its host took it down under pressure from publishers. Wikipedia records the domain returning a 404 as of March 2026. We tried it ourselves while writing this: the domain does not resolve.

The card was posted in September 2026 — fourteen months after the service went dark, in the number-one slot.

Three more are not free tools. They are a different thing.

Entries two, three and eight are libgen.is, sci-hub.se and pdfdrive.com, described as “millions of free textbooks”, “free research papers” and “free PDF downloads”.

These are not underpublicised utilities like Photopea. They are shadow libraries: sites that distribute copyrighted books and paywalled academic papers without the rightsholders’ permission. Both of the first two have been the subject of court orders and injunctions in multiple countries, and neither resolved when we checked.

We are not going to lecture about this, and we are not linking them. But it matters in a specific, practical way for anybody reading a blog about building a channel or a business: “free” on a tool card usually means a pricing decision somebody made. On these three it means somebody else’s rights. If your work is monetised, the material you build it from is part of your risk surface — and the previous card from this same page, one day earlier, carried a badge reading “all legal”.

And the list already contains the lawful version of all three

This is the part that makes deleting them painless. Three of the four needs those entries serve are already met by other entries on the same card.

That is the whole argument. You lose nothing by cutting those four, because Project Gutenberg, Open Culture and Archive.org are already sitting in the same twenty, and the open-access world has spent twenty years building the lawful route to the rest of it.

Unpaywall is the one most people have never heard of and should. It is a browser extension and a database that checks, for any paper you are looking at, whether the authors have legally posted a free copy themselves — which, for a large share of recent research, they have. It is the sci-hub need, answered by the authors.

One more has quietly moved

unscreen.com, entry fifteen, “remove any video background”. The domain now redirects to a Canva feature page. We followed it this morning.

Unscreen was built by the same people as remove.bg, and that lineage ended up inside Canva. The standalone site is not a standalone site any more. Nothing is broken — the capability still exists — but if you saved this card expecting a quick single-purpose tool, what you now get is a sign-up page for a design suite. That is the failure a link list can never show you, because the link still works.

The sixteen that earn their place

A note on remove.bg, since it also appeared on the previous day’s card and we checked it then: it is free and excellent, but free output is capped at roughly a quarter of a megapixel. Fine for a quick cut-out, too small for a thumbnail. The tool belongs on the list; the word “free” needs the asterisk.

The three-minute audit for any link list

This card is a good example of why the audit is worth doing, because the list is mostly excellent and the problems are concentrated at the top where nobody looks twice.

Four honest caveats

1. Three domains did not resolve from where we are, and that is not the same as gone. libgen and sci-hub are blocked or filtered in many countries, so a failed lookup here proves nothing about their status elsewhere. For 12ft.io the shutdown is separately documented and dated; for the other two, the point stands on what they are rather than on whether they load.
2. The 12ft.io date comes from secondary sources. Multiple alternative-tool sites give July 2025 and Wikipedia records a 404 in March 2026; we did not find primary reporting. What we can confirm ourselves is that it does not resolve.
3. We are not lawyers and this is not legal advice. The distinction we are drawing is simpler than a legal one: a site is giving away either its own service or somebody else’s work, and the card describes both kinds in the same voice.
4. The other sixteen are good and we are not hedging on them. Photopea, Squoosh, Wolfram Alpha, Gutenberg, Open Culture, Have I Been Pwned — these deserve more attention than they get, exactly as the caption says.

The one-line version

Sixteen of these twenty are a genuinely good list of underused sites. The other four are a dead service and three shadow libraries — and the list already contains the lawful answer to most of what they were there for. Project Gutenberg is entry seven. Archive.org is entry six.

So delete four, add Unpaywall and Open Library, and you have a better card than the one you started with: nothing on it is somebody else’s property, nothing on it is fourteen months dead, and it is still the thing the caption promised — sites that quietly do work you are otherwise paying for.