People Are Grateful These 25 Things Are Still Absolutely Free-Of-Charge
When I was younger a teacher asked us to write an essay about ‘the best things in life being free’. We each got to choose one thing and I chose music – because I couldn’t believe we got to listen to it absolutely free on the radio. Before all the streaming platforms stepped in and monetised it that is. However, if we pause to think about it, there are still many things that we get to enjoy for absolutely free.
In fact, recently a Redditor sparked a fun discussion online when they encouraged netizens to list things they couldn’t believe we get to enjoy totally free of charge. The answers rolled in and we’ve collated some of the most popular responses in the gallery below.
#1 Public Libraries.
They do so much good for their communities, providing safe places to work, learn and read and use the internet. Librarians work so incredibly hard to make their local branches welcoming and fun places to explore and people take them for granted. I know they aren’t “free” because we pay for them with taxes, but their budgets are usually incredibly small and they do their best. Most have dvds/blue-rays and video games and audio books as well if you didn’t know. 10/10 would recommend.
#2 Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library.
#3 The natural history museum in London. Go there, it’s awesome.
#4 YouTube. It’s crazy how much stuff is on there for free. Sure there’s ads but still.
#5 Internet Archive.
#6 VLC player for Pc and mobile. The best encoder and decoder ever. It can literally play every audio and video media and is totally free! Wild. The founder refused 55 million dollars for it to keep it free.
#7 Google Maps !
Do you realize we had to pay for maps before ? And it didn’t even indicate the shortest path, neither for cars nor for bikes or walks ? And it was only maps of area and not the entire freaking world ? What a great time to get lost.
#8 The Libby app. I know it’s through your library but still, it’s such an amazing resource!
#9 Khan Academy.
#10 Wikipedia!
#11 The info in photos app that tells what kind of plant/animal/bug you take a pic of.
#12 The radio.
#13 The internet! We don’t always think of it as free because you have to pay to connect to the internet but you don’t have to pay to access it. It’s just there, for everyone.
#14 Blender 3d software.
#15 Smithsonian museums – beautiful, educational, amazing and free .
#16 Adblockers.
#17 Our neighborhood parks. Walking my dog around a beautiful park is the highlight of my day.
#18 WAZE. For those that don’t know it’s a GPS app that has a community of people that allows you to mark the map for hazards (99% cops). It’s saved me many tickets and has gotten increasingly popular over the years and gets more and more reliabl.
#19 The St. Louis Zoo. Admission is free.
#20 Hiking trails (most of them). Maintained, beautiful paths I can just wander whenever I want? Perfect.
#21 Linux.
#22 GPS. It costs millions of dollars a day to maintain.
#23 Canva is a pretty fantastic design program for basic stuff. They have a paid version with more features but even the free version is pretty robust. I am a professional designer and use it sometimes over other “deeper” design programs for its simple UI.
#24 Archive of our own. Got me through a lot of pain.
#25 I have admiration for Craigslist and how Jim kept it free (with exception from job & apt ads).
Shanilou Perera
Shanilou has always loved reading and learning about the world we live in. While she enjoys fictional books and stories just as much, since childhood she was especially fascinated by encyclopaedias and strangely enough, self-help books. As a kid, she spent most of her time consuming as much knowledge as she could get her hands on and could always be found at the library. Now, she still enjoys finding out about all the amazing things that surround us in our day-to-day lives and is blessed to be able to write about them to share with the whole world as a profession.
