Resources to build on
Live maps of planes, ships and storms, open data, book and art archives, space and science. 99 remarkable sites, each with what you can build on it: is there an official API, does it need a key, can you download the data, may you use it commercially. Quoted from each site's own pages, checked Oct 23, 2026.
For AI agents: resources/agent.md · every card has its own agent.md · MCP find_resources at agentgid.com/mcp
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Earthquake alerts near you in TelegramA bot that tells you within minutes when a strong earthquake hits near a city you follow, with a link to the USGS event page.A live globe of today's earthquakesA spinning 3D globe on your site that draws every earthquake of the last day, sized by magnitude, straight from the USGS feed.A country dashboard from open statisticsA dashboard that compares countries on population, income, health and energy, built from World Bank indicators and Our World in Data charts.Art of the day from public-domain museum collectionsA site, widget or wallpaper that shows one public-domain masterpiece a day, with its story, from The Met and the Rijksmuseum.A daily digest of new papers on your topicAn agent that reads new arXiv papers in your field every morning and sends a short digest with links.Ask questions of a classic bookA chat assistant that answers questions about a public-domain novel and quotes the passage it used.
Live planet
Real-time maps of planes, ships, storms, lightning, earthquakes and forests.
USGS Latest Earthquakes
Every quake on Earth large enough to register appears within minutes, and the whole historical catalog is searchable by place, date and magnitude.
LiveAPI, no keyDownloadCommercial OK
Zoom Earth
You can scrub back through the last day of satellite frames and watch a cyclone spin up or wildfire smoke drift across a continent.
LiveNon-commercial
Flightradar24
Click any dot in the sky to see the plane, its route and its altitude, fed by more than 50,000 ground receivers run largely by enthusiasts.
LiveAPI (paid)License unclear
MarineTraffic
Zoom into any strait or harbour and see the tankers, ferries and fishing boats moving through it right now.
LiveAPI (paid)License unclear
Windy
Wind is drawn as flowing particles across the whole globe, so you can watch weather systems move and compare forecast models side by side.
LiveAPICommercial: conditions
LightningMaps.org
Strikes pop up on the map within seconds, and you can watch thunderstorms cross a country, all detected by hobbyists' antennas.
LiveCommercial: conditions
Global Forest Watch
Near-real-time satellite alerts let you see where forest is being cleared this week, down to individual patches.
ChangedLiveAPIDownloadCommercial: conditions
Submarine Cable Map
It shows how the internet physically crosses oceans, and which coastal towns your traffic actually passes through.
License unclear
Weather and climate
Open forecasts, radar, climate history and air quality from weather services and science agencies.
Open-Meteo
You can pull a forecast or 80 years of hourly history for any coordinate with one plain URL and no sign-up, and the whole server is open source so you can run your own copy.
LiveAPI, no keyDownloadCommercial: conditions
MET Norway Weather API
It is a national weather service's own production API, open to anyone worldwide without a key and licensed for commercial use, as long as your app identifies itself and caches politely.
LiveAPI, no keyDownloadCommercial OK
National Weather Service API (api.weather.gov)
The same warnings and grid forecasts that US forecasters issue are available to any program for free, and the content is public domain.
LiveAPI, no keyCommercial OK
NOAA NCEI Climate Data Online and Access Data Service
You can pull more than a century of daily highs, lows and rainfall for a single weather station with one URL and see how a place's climate has shifted.
LiveAPI, no keyDownloadCommercial: conditions
ECMWF Open Data
It hands out raw global output from one of the world's leading forecast centres, including its AI forecast model, under a licence that allows commercial reuse.
LiveAPI, no keyDownloadCommercial OK
Copernicus Climate Data Store (CDS)
ERA5 lets you reconstruct the weather for any hour at any spot on Earth since 1940 on a 0.25° grid, which is the backbone of much modern climate research.
LiveAPIDownloadCommercial OK
DWD Open Data Server
A whole national weather service's raw output, from global model runs to decades of daily station records, sits in open folders you can browse and script against without signing up.
LiveDownloadCommercial OK
NASA POWER (Prediction Of Worldwide Energy Resources)
One key-less GET request returns decades of sunshine and temperature for any coordinate, which is exactly the input a solar-panel or crop model needs.
LiveAPI, no keyDownloadCommercial OK
RainViewer Weather Maps API
You can animate live rain moving across most of the world on your own map with one JSON call and a tile URL template, no key needed.
LiveAPI, no keyCommercial: conditions
OpenAQ
It puts readings from many countries' monitoring networks into one schema, so you can compare the air in two cities with the same query.
LiveAPIDownloadCommercial: conditions
World data and statistics
Open statistics about countries, people, economies and the internet.
Our World in Data
You can watch long-run trends for almost every country side by side, often going back a century or more.
APIDownloadCommercial OK
World Bank Open Data
One simple URL pattern returns decades of population, income, health or energy figures for any country.
API, no keyDownloadCommercial OK
Gapminder
Its moving bubble charts show how countries' health and wealth changed over time and often overturn common assumptions about the world.
DownloadCommercial OK
TÜİK Data Portal (TurkStat)
It is the primary source for official Turkish figures, from inflation to greenhouse gas emissions, in Turkish and English.
DownloadCommercial: conditions
Worldometer
Watching births, deaths and energy use tick upward in real time makes abstract global numbers feel concrete.
LiveNon-commercial
Internet Live Stats
The 'one second' view shows how much happens online in a single heartbeat, which is a striking way to grasp internet scale.
LiveNon-commercial
Maps and places
Open maps, historical maps, strange places and windows onto the world.
OpenStreetMap
Every road, building, bench and footpath is mapped by people, and you can download the whole planet and build your own maps from it.
API, no keyDownloadCommercial: conditions
David Rumsey Map Collection
You can zoom into centuries-old atlases at full detail and lay some of them over today's map to see how places changed.
DownloadCommercial: conditions
The True Size Of
Sliding Greenland down to Africa shows at once how badly standard web maps distort the size of places near the poles.
License unclear
Old Maps Online
Pan to any town and see which old maps of it exist across collections around the world.
License unclear
MapCrunch
One click puts you on an unknown road somewhere on Earth, which makes it a quiet, endless virtual trip and a natural base for guessing games.
License unclear
Atlas Obscura
It is a catalogue of odd, hidden and surprising spots you will not find in ordinary travel guides.
License unclear
WindowSwap
Each click drops you into a stranger's flat in another city, with the street noise and weather of that moment.
License unclear
Virtual Vacation
You can pick a city on a map and stroll, drive or fly through it in real footage, or test yourself by guessing where a random clip was filmed.
LiveLicense unclear
Interactive explainers
Playful pages that explain size, scale and numbers by letting you explore.
neal.fun
Each piece turns a big idea, like scale, money or time, into something you can click through in a few minutes.
License unclear
The Scale of the Universe 2
One scroll takes you from the smallest particles to the size of the observable universe, and the jumps between neighbours make sizes finally feel real.
License unclear
Data stories and visualization
Visual essays and tools for turning data into charts and stories.
The Pudding
Each story asks a playful question about everyday culture and answers it with a dataset you can open and reuse yourself.
DownloadCommercial OK
Information is Beautiful
Messy, argued-over topics are turned into single charts you can take in at a glance and then check against the source spreadsheet.
DownloadCommercial: conditions
Observable
A big public gallery of live, editable charts and explainers where you can fork any cell, change the code and watch the result update instantly.
DownloadCommercial OK
Space and astronomy
The solar system in 3D, the night sky and NASA's image archives.
NASA Image and Video Library
You can pull up the original full-size frames from Apollo, the Space Shuttle and today's missions, each with NASA's own captions, dates and keywords.
API, no keyDownloadCommercial: conditions
Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD)
Three decades of the sky in one archive: every day a new image, each with a short story and links that send you down a rabbit hole.
API, no keyCommercial: conditions
NASA's Eyes
You can ride along with any of over 150 NASA missions, scrub time from 1950 to 2050, or watch which spacecraft is talking to Earth right now.
LiveDownloadCommercial: conditions
Stellarium Web
Set any city and date and see the real sky, down to faint stars from the Gaia catalogue, without installing anything.
LiveDownloadCommercial: conditions
Books and libraries
Digital libraries and archives of books, films, newspapers and software.
Project Gutenberg
It is one of the largest clean, proofread corpora of classic literature, and the whole catalog and text set can be downloaded in bulk.
API, no keyDownloadCommercial: conditions
Open Library
Almost every page has a machine-readable twin: add .json to a work or author URL and you get the structured record behind it.
API, no keyDownloadCommercial: conditions
Internet Archive
Behind every item is a folder of original files and metadata you can fetch directly, from old radio shows to scanned books and forgotten home movies.
API, no keyDownloadCommercial: conditions
Library of Congress
Any search page on loc.gov can be turned into structured data, so whole collections of historic photos or maps become something you can query and plot.
API, no keyDownloadCommercial: conditions
Europeana
One query can pull paintings, manuscripts, newspapers and sound recordings from institutions all over Europe, filtered to items that are free to reuse.
APIDownloadCommercial: conditions
Digital Public Library of America
It stitches together small local archives and big institutions, so one search can surface a town historical society's photos next to national collections.
License unclear
archive.today
It keeps frozen, script-free copies of pages that later change or vanish, so you can see what a page said on a given day.
License unclear
Museums and open art
Museum collections and public-domain art you can browse, and often reuse.
The Met Open Access
Five thousand years of art in one open API: you can pull a Van Gogh's full record and high-res image with a single unauthenticated request.
API, no keyDownloadCommercial OK
Rijksmuseum Open Data
You get Dutch Golden Age masterpieces and hundreds of thousands of lesser-known objects as open, linked data with zoomable images, most of it free even for commercial use.
API, no keyDownloadCommercial OK
Google Arts & Culture
Gigapixel zooms let you get closer to the brushstrokes than you could standing in the gallery, and you can walk through museums you may never visit.
License unclear
WikiArt
Its tagging by style, genre and movement lets you trace how art changed across centuries, from well-known masters to artists few people have heard of.
APINon-commercial
The Public Domain Review
Every post is a rabbit hole into forgotten prints, diagrams and oddities from old libraries, each traced back to the institution that holds the scan.
Commercial: conditions
Open Culture
It is a curated map of free culture: one list can lead you from a lecture series to a silent film to a recorded poetry reading.
License unclear
Music and sound
Maps of music genres, radio from other decades and sound made from data.
Musicmap
You can trace how one style grew out of another across a century, click any node, and hear typical tracks from that branch.
Non-commercial
Radiooooo
It turns a map into a time machine for your ears; pick a country and a decade and hear what was playing there.
Non-commercial
Listen to Wikipedia
It turns the world's encyclopedia being written in real time into calm ambient music you can leave running.
LiveCommercial: conditions
Radio Garden
Moving a dot across the planet and hearing the radio change from one town to the next makes distance feel very small.
LiveLicense unclear
Tunefind
It answers the 'what was that song?' question for a specific scene of a show.
License unclear
Music For Programming
An ad-free, artist-curated series whose track lists double as a guide to quiet electronic music.
DownloadNon-commercial
myNoise
Each soundscape works like an instrument you tune yourself with sliders, rather than a fixed loop.
Commercial: conditions
Knowledge and science
Encyclopedias, papers, science news and the time and sky anywhere on Earth.
Wikipedia
You can query, stream or download the whole of human knowledge as people keep writing it, and reuse it in commercial products if you credit and share alike.
LiveAPI, no keyDownloadCommercial: conditions
arXiv
Much new research, especially in AI and physics, shows up here first, and you can query or mirror all of its metadata freely.
API, no keyDownloadCommercial OK
timeanddate.com
It answers the deceptively hard questions of time: when DST flips in a given country, when the sun sets there, and which day is a holiday where.
LiveLicense unclear
ScienceDaily
It is a steady daily stream of new findings across every field, each story pointing back to the institution and the paper behind it.
Commercial: conditions
Wolfram|Alpha
It computes answers instead of searching for them, so you get step-by-step math and live figures from curated data.
LiveAPICommercial: conditions
Research tools
Search engines, maps and AI assistants for scientific papers.
Semantic Scholar
You can walk the citation network of almost any paper in code, from a single lookup to a full snapshot of the whole graph.
API, no keyDownloadCommercial: conditions
Connected Papers
Starting from a single paper you get a map of its neighbourhood, which quickly shows the key works you missed.
APICommercial: conditions
Elicit
It does the dull part of a literature review, screening and pulling numbers out of papers, and shows the source for every claim.
API (paid)Commercial: conditions
Consensus
For a yes/no question it shows how the studies split, which says more than any single paper.
API (paid)License unclear
SciSpace
You can upload a dense paper and ask it plain questions, with each answer pointing back to the paragraph it came from.
License unclear
Developer utilities
Small browser tools developers keep open: regex, shell, diagrams, code images, status checks.
regex101
You can watch a pattern match step by step, see why it fails, and catch catastrophic backtracking before it hits production.
API, no keyLicense unclear
Excalidraw
Diagrams look like napkin sketches, which makes architecture drawings feel friendly, and the scene file is plain JSON a program can generate.
Commercial OK
explainshell
Cryptic one-liners copied from forums turn into a readable map of what every switch actually does before you run them.
DownloadCommercial: conditions
Code Beautify
Almost any quick conversion a developer needs (JSON to CSV, XML to JSON, Base64, hashes, test data) sits one page away, with most of the work done in your browser.
License unclear
tldraw
The same engine behind a polished public whiteboard is a programmable canvas you can drive from code, shape by shape.
Commercial: conditions
Carbon
It is the tool behind many of the neat code screenshots on social media, and its whole editor is MIT-licensed code you can run yourself.
License unclear
ray.so
A fast, good-looking way to make code screenshots, and its Next.js source is public, so you can see exactly how the rendering works.
License unclear
Downdetector
When a big app or cloud service breaks, the spike in user reports shows up on its chart within minutes.
LiveAPINon-commercial
FAST.com
It tests against the same Netflix servers that stream video, and its loaded-latency figure exposes bufferbloat that simple speed tests miss.
LiveLicense unclear
Temp Mail
Handy for checking that your app's verification and password-reset emails actually arrive and render, without cluttering a real inbox.
LiveLicense unclear
10 Minute Mail
It has been running since 2006, and it's a quick way to see your app's welcome or verification email arrive end to end.
LiveLicense unclear
Image, video and PDF tools
Free online editors and converters for images, video and PDFs, and the APIs behind some of them.
cobalt
It is fully open source, so you can read how a media proxy works and run your own instance instead of trusting a random download site.
APILicense unclear
Photopea
A full Photoshop-style editor running locally in a web page, which you can also drop into your own site with a single iframe URL.
API, no keyCommercial OK
TinyWow
One bookmark covers most quick file chores, from PDF to Word to background removal, without signing up.
License unclear
remove.bg
One API call turns a messy product or portrait shot into a clean cutout, which is why so many shop and design tools wire it in.
Commercial: conditions
Cleanup.pictures
Painting over a tourist and watching the wall behind them appear is a neat, hands-on demo of AI inpainting.
API (paid)Commercial OK
Squoosh
Dragging the slider between the original and an AVIF or WebP version shows exactly how much quality you trade for each kilobyte.
Commercial OK
TinEye
Sorting matches by oldest first can show where a viral photo first appeared and how it was cropped or edited along the way.
API (paid)Commercial: conditions
Smallpdf
Compress, convert, merge or sign a PDF in the browser, with uploads deleted on a schedule the site states.
Commercial OK
iLovePDF
The same tools that people click on the website are exposed as a task-based REST API with official SDKs, so a prototype can go from manual to automated quickly.
APICommercial OK
Security and privacy
Check leaks and files, share secrets that self-destruct, delete old accounts.
Have I Been Pwned
It shows how many real-world leaks a single address has been caught in, and the password check works without ever sending the password itself.
LiveAPIDownloadCommercial: conditions
VirusTotal
You can see in seconds how many security vendors disagree about the same file, and community comments show how a threat was spotted.
LiveAPINon-commercial
Privnote
A simple way to pass a secret once without it sitting in chat or email history.
License unclear
file.io
It is built around files that do not linger: links expire on their own instead of piling up in cloud storage.
ChangedLiveLicense unclear
AccountKiller
It shows at a glance which services let you leave cleanly and which ones make it nearly impossible.
Non-commercial
Find and compare
Where to stream, what to use instead, what a product cost before.
AlternativeTo
Type in any paid tool you use and you often find a free or open-source replacement ranked by other users.
Non-commercial
JustWatch
One search shows where a title is streaming right now, and it changes from country to country.
LiveAPIDownloadCommercial: conditions
camelcamelcamel
The history chart shows whether a 'deal' is really low or the usual price, often years back.
LiveLicense unclear