Six Free Apps for Mac and Windows With No Account at All
Six of the 128 apps cost nothing and ask for no account: a PDF editor, an image editor, a compressor, a file shipper, a chess game and a torrent client. All six install on macOS and Windows.
"Free" carries at least four meanings in desktop software. A trial that ends in fourteen days. An export with a watermark across it. A tier that stops one feature short of the job. An account, handed over in exchange for the download. Each one is a product decision somebody made, and none of them is a crime, but together they have worn the word down.
Six of the menu's 128 apps are free in that plain sense. They cost nothing, they don't ask who you are, and the work happens on your machine. All six ship installers for macOS and Windows, including Windows on ARM. Four run with the Wi-Fi switched off. A fifth needs only your own network. The sixth is a torrent client, which wants the internet by definition.
Four questions to ask before you install anything
- Does it ask who you are before it opens a file?
- Does it ask for a card before it saves?
- Does the export come back clean, with no watermark and no size cap?
- Does it work with the Wi-Fi off?
Those four separate a free app from a free sample, and answering them takes about ten minutes. All six below pass. Where the last question has a caveat, it's in the entry rather than a footnote.
PDFCafe: fix the typo inside the PDF
Most PDF trouble is small and specific. A contract arrives with your company name misspelled on page four. A form needs a signature and a date. Two appendices should have been one file, and somebody sent them as two.
PDFCafe handles those without the file leaving your disk. You can click a word already on the page and correct it, or change its size and colour, or delete it; the replacement keeps the space the original occupied, so a longer phrase can't crowd the word beside it. Signatures live in a library you build once, and any of them can be applied to every page in a single go when a document needs initialling. The thumbnail strip does page work: select a few pages, right-click, and save them as one JPG per page or gather them into a new PDF.
Japanese and Chinese render properly too, with only the font subset a page needs embedded in the file.
The limit worth knowing: a scanned page is a photograph until something puts a text layer underneath it, and PDFCafe edits text that already exists. Turning a stack of phone photos into a searchable document belongs to ScanToPDF and ScanToDocx. Version 3.9.0, macOS and Windows.
Pixpresso: the everyday image jobs
Pixpresso is built for work that doesn't deserve a photo suite. Crop a screenshot to 1:1, 3:2, 4:3 or 16:9, or type the exact pixel frame. Resize with the ratio locked, with the real output size shown before you save. Rotate, straighten, flip. Mark an image up with rectangles, ellipses, arrows, free drawing and text in any colour.
Two features earn it a permanent place. Dragging across a region of a picture copies the words inside it as ordinary text, with the recognition running on your machine. That one saves a surprising amount of retyping. And the sidebar lists every other image in that folder, so it doubles as a viewer for working through a run of captures.
The limit: this is markup and cropping, not development. Raw files and masking are CremaStudio's territory. Version 3.3.0, macOS and Windows.
TinyImage: smaller files, same pixels
TinyImage re-encodes PNG, JPEG and WebP files smaller, and it deliberately leaves the dimensions alone. A 4000 by 3000 photo comes out 4000 by 3000, in the same format, so the image still opens in whatever expects it.
The whole window is the drop target. Drop a folder and a compressed copy of each file lands beside its original with a suffix you choose, photo-min.jpg by default, and the originals stay exactly as they were. Three levels of squeeze sit behind one control. When re-encoding would make a file larger, which happens with icons and already-optimised images, it keeps the original bytes and tells you instead of handing back a bigger "compressed" file.
The limit: it changes file size, not pixel dimensions or format. Resizing a few hundred images in one pass, or converting between formats, is PhotoBatch's job. Version 1.7.6, macOS and Windows.
FileShipper: a file to your phone in seconds
FileShipper moves files between your computers and phones over local Wi-Fi. Computers running it find each other on a radar and you tap the one you want. Phones install no app at all: scan a QR code and a plain browser page opens, letting an iPhone or an Android send files to the computer and pull files back.
The transfer goes directly between the two devices, so a large file never touches a server and arrives at the speed of your own network. On a shared network there's an optional PIN. There's also a shared pool any joined device can add to, which is how a room full of people swaps files without a group chat.
The constraint is the same thing that makes it private: both devices have to be on the same network. For sending across the internet, use whatever you already use. Version 1.8.0, macOS and Windows.
ChessCafe: chess with an army
ChessCafe replaces plastic pieces with sculpted armies in a torch-lit hall. When you take a piece, your figure walks the distance, strikes, and claims the square while the stone changes colour under its boot. The queen throws fire down the line without leaving her square.
Three opponent strengths cover the range from forgiving to merciless: Squire plays fast and loose, Knight thinks a few moves ahead, Warlord searches properly. The engine runs on its own thread, so the board never stutters while it thinks. Three armies can be mixed per side, seven battlegrounds relight the world with their own sky and music, and hotseat mode passes the board across the table.
The limit: no account exists, which also means no online opponents and no leaderboard. Version 1.5.1, macOS and Windows.
TorrentMilk: play it while it downloads
TorrentMilk is built around the play button. Paste a magnet link and the video starts as soon as the first pieces arrive, while the rest downloads behind it. Seeking works the way it should: jump forward and the player waits for that part of the file instead of refusing.
What you download becomes a wall of poster cards rather than a folder of filenames. Favourites and collections group titles, every file remembers its position after a restart, and MKV and AVI are converted as they play, so there's no second player to install. Subtitle files load on their own, with the timing adjustable.
The limit: a torrent client is a tool, not a catalogue. It hosts and indexes nothing, and what you download is your responsibility in the way it always was. It's also the only app here that needs the internet. Version 2.0.0, macOS and Windows.
Where free stops being enough
Three cases send people to a paid app, and they're worth naming.
The job outgrows a single file. Compressing one image is fine in a free app; doing it to four hundred with a naming convention is PhotoBatch.
The format has to change. Editing text inside a PDF and turning a PDF into an editable Word file are different jobs, and the second is PDFToWord. Moving between 26 document formats is DocConvert, after a one-time engine download.
The work has to run on a schedule, in the background, or across a team. None of these six syncs between machines, by design.
The rest of the menu, in numbers
Of the 128 apps, sixty carry a one-off price between $19.99 and $29.99, with NitroNet alone at $24.99. Sixty-two aren't sold separately at all and come with a membership. Six are free, which is where this started.
Solo Cup is $3.99 a month for one computer, or $1.99 a month billed yearly at $23.88. Family Roast covers up to five computers for $7.99 a month, or $3.99 a month billed yearly at $47.88. That's five licence slots. Each computer you sign in on takes one, and removing a device frees it immediately. The 7-day trial adds a card when it starts and charges nothing until it ends.
Two more pieces if you want the longer version: PDFCafe Is Now Free covers what changed inside that app, and The Whole Menu Now Costs $1.99 a Month walks through the pricing arithmetic.
Start with one
Install the app that matches a job you have this week, and use it on real work before deciding anything about the rest of the menu. The six cost nothing either way, so the only thing you spend is twenty minutes. That beats reading a feature list, mine included.