Ask Lemmy

Pi hole

https://pi-hole.net/

Your local city college may or may not offer free classes (in San Francisco, you just need to show proof that you live in the city with some legal status).

Some public transportation is free for certain groups (youth and folks experiencing homelessness can get free passes here).

"First X of the month" at the zoo/a museum/whatever

lots of venues have free events.

A jog, bike ride, hike

lots of great stuff outside!

A little late but OpenTaxSolver - free desktop tax software that gives you a printout of tax forms that you can mail in. And it includes a few states too. Way easier than the annoying corporate sites that constantly log you out and charge a fee for every little thing.

Edit: To my non-American friends, you don't need to worry about this

https://calibre-ebook.com/

Own your own ebooks. Make sure all devices work with whatever format you need.

Learn a little docker and start self hosting stuff! Pihole is a great one to start with, but there are lots of other awesome projects out there:

https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted

What3words.com and app

Basically the earth has been segragated into 10 foot x 10 foot squares that are easily identified by 3 words, super accurate, easy to tell emergency services. No more need to know lat/long to tell someone where you're at.

Not free as in freedom, but gratis. Also only works for people who are on Discord - FreeStuff Bot will notify you every time a game on one of the popular PC platforms is available for free.

lichess.org is a fantastic online chess platform for players of all skill levels. it's free and---what's more--it's ad-free (unlike the parasitic organisation that's squatting on the chess.com domain).

it has one-on-one on-demand match-ups, tournaments, puzzles, user-published training courses, multiple chess variants, and so much more.

it's one of only two online resources to which i deem donating regularly worthwhile (the other being wikipedia).

do check it out. chess is one really healthy mental habit to inculcate.

I know lemmy is social media for people with a favorite Linux distro so I’m preaching to the choir here, but so much software is free as in speech it is truly wonderful. It’s like the only thing I love about being a millennial

Your neighbor's trash. It's stunning what I find and fix, refurbish, repurpose or sell. Had a friend that used to cruise her hood on trash day, her and her husband would load the truck, sell it back to 'em on a Saturday garage sale. 12-14 hours biweekly work, ~$400 every other weekend.

My wife's friends dumpster dive at Walmart, though I question how that's possible. Most big box stores make that impossible. Dunno. In any case, it's wild what these stores chunk out. If Lowe's would let me, I'd haul home a pickup full every week.

khanacademy.org

Great resource for really well taught contents on an extensive variety of fields

LMMS - free and open source garage band. It's a little weird on how you do a song, but it's pretty great.

Tips: Look at Beats and Baselines Editor and Piano Roll Editor first to probably get you where you want to be.

Yucata - online boardgames, take your turn when you can, no pressure.

To add a couple more FOSS programs, OBS Studio and kdenlive are both really robust video production and editing software.

In Canada, crown land camping and Christmas trees. You can camp on crown land and cut up to 10 cubic metres of wood a year.

Me

Got to say Keepass, Open source Password Manager. And Internet Archive, a non-profit library of millions of free texts, movies, software, music, websites, and more 😊

Maybe this is sorta dumb, but meditation is a free way to feel good and spend time, and also a free method of stress relief and to reduce suffering.

It's not free in terms of your time & energy, and it might cost some money to learn, but the best meditation manual I know of is free online, or at least it used to be - it looks like it was locked down on archive.org (where it used to be freely available), but you can still find it on Anna's Archive, and you can probably find it at your local library. Either way, you can learn to meditate for free, that's how I did it.

Running is likewise relatively free (you do generally have to pay for running shoes, and athletic clothing can be expensive, but it's relatively cheap over the lifetime of those items, and it's cheaper than most other activities). A great and accessible way to feel good and stay healthy.