Free software made by an individual is one of the better deals on the internet. It is also where you will find the highest concentration of things that look finished and are not. The difference matters most when you are about to hand something your working files.
These are the checks worth doing before you download anything, and none of them take more than a minute.
Is anyone still there
Find the last time it was updated. If it lives on GitHub, look at the most recent commit and whether anyone answers the open issues. A tool that has not been touched in two years is not necessarily broken, but nobody is coming if it breaks on your machine. For something you will use once, fine. For something in your weekly routine, that is a real risk.
Is there a person behind it
A name, a profile, somewhere they can be reached. This is not sentimentality. Software from an identifiable person carries an incentive that anonymous software does not: their name is attached to it. It also means there is somebody to ask when the setup guide skips a step.
Where does your data go
The single most useful question, and the easiest to skip. Does it run entirely on your machine, or does it upload what you feed it? For anything touching client work, financial records or personal information, a tool that runs locally is not merely nicer, it is the difference between using it at work and not being allowed to.
What is it actually charging
Free has several meanings. Free because it is genuinely free. Free because it is the trial half of something that will ask for a subscription in a month. Free because your data is the product. Free because it is open source and somebody scratched their own itch. All four are legitimate. Only one of them is free the way you probably mean it, so find out which you are looking at.
Can you get out
Look at what it exports. A tool that keeps your work in a format only it can read is a tool you cannot leave, and free things get abandoned more often than paid ones. Plain formats mean the tool can disappear and your work survives.
What is the licence
Mostly this matters if you are using it commercially. Open source does not automatically mean free for business use, and a few licences have real obligations attached. Thirty seconds in the LICENSE file now beats an awkward conversation later.
The best free tools are usually small, obviously made by one person, and honest about what they do not do.
The short version
- Updated recently, or at least not abandoned mid-bug.
- A named human you could contact.
- Clear about whether your data leaves your machine.
- Honest about what free means here.
- Exports to something you could open in ten years.
- A licence that covers what you plan to do with it.
None of this requires being technical. It requires two minutes and a willingness to close the tab when the answers are missing. Software made by one person is often better than the corporate alternative, precisely because somebody cared. These checks are how you find the ones where somebody still does. We run every one of them before anything goes on our free tools list.