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Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to DontRef.Me

Save yourself from being tracked by evil URL references

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. DontRef.Me launched in 2019; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1

    Hi HN, I'm excited to share my open source project, a browser orchestrator. It's purpose is to make it easy to manage many browser profiles on one system. Currently it only works on MacOS, but since I've built it using Tauri (which is a Rust backend and TypeScript frontend), I expect to add Linux and Windows support in the future. I've built it primarily for myself as I use a lot of browsers and having an easy way to manage all of my profiles would make (have made, actually) my dock less cluttered haha. Also, part of why I built it is because as someone who doesn't really care about…

    Apr 2026 · donutbrowser.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    Alright so if you run a self-hosted blog, you've probably noticed AI companies scraping it for training data. And not just a little (RIP to your server bill). There isn't much you can do about it without cloudflare. These companies ignore robots.txt, and you're competing with teams with more resources than you. It's you vs the MJs of programming, you're not going to win. But there is a solution. Now I'm not going to say it's a great solution...but a solution is a solution. If your website contains content that will trigger their scraper's safeguards, it will get dropped from their data…

    Dec 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  3. 3DR

    I'd like to invite everyone to try out DontBeEvil.rip, an experimental search engine for developers. tl;dr $ alias rip="curl -G -H 'Accept: text/plain' --url https://dontbeevil.rip/search --data-urlencode " $ rip 'q=Heartbleed bug' DontBeEvil.rip is a year long experiment to see if a small team can build a developer-focused search engine that is self-sustaining on $10 monthly subscriptions. It works by only indexing high-quality resources that are relevant to developers. You won't get useless listicles because we'll never crawl them. Relevant urls are harvested from HN,…

    2022 · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    Unlimited URL shortener to create powerful links

    2021 · linkler.me · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    Find out what's lurking in your backlink profile.

    2019 · linkgraph.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6LS

    Hi HN! My name is David ([email protected]) and I am the author of Linkidex (www.linkidex.com)! My goal is to make bookmarks better. I built Linkidex because I was getting overwhelmed by the number of things I had to keep track of on the internet during my day to day job. Constantly needing to re-find various wikis or jira epics or project proposals or whatever was eating into my day. I was using a chrome extension to manage urls, but the extension was getting unwieldy as my list of “important URLs” grew and I started looking for alternatives. There are a few really cool bookmark managers…

    2022 · linkidex.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7
    + Link▲72

    A URL Shortener that helps combat phishing

    2018 · plus.link · its alternatives →

  8. 8
    Trails▲81

    Hey all, Justin here. I previously built Phind, the AI search engine for developers. One of the biggest problems we had there was figuring out what went wrong with bad searches. We had tons of searches per day, but less than 1% of users gave any explicit feedback. So we were either manually digging through searches or making general system improvements and hoping they helped. This problem gets harder with agents. Traces are longer and more complex. It takes more effort to review them, so I'm building a tool that lets you analyze LLM outputs directly to help developers of LLM apps and agents…

    Jan 2026 · trails-red.vercel.app · its alternatives →

  9. 9MF

    Hi! Long time reader, first time submitter. I've finallllyy got my first webapp online. It's been a long time coming, I started it over a year ago and just been an hour here, a couple of hours here, and a period of a couple of months of nothing. I first wrote it as a way to learn some python it sort of grew to fill a need I had. It's at a point now where I'd LOVE some feedback as I am going round in circules. Please, it's free, just hit the home page, plugin in a name/email and url you want to links checked on. If you use the name 'DeleteMe' I will remove the account after a week, so feel…

    2012 · sitecrawl.net · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    Don't just shorten your URL, make it suspicious and frighten

    2014 · shadyurl.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Keep users on your website with one line of code.

    2021 · github.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12
    URLert▲18

    Introducing URLert Guard, our new browser extension designed to provide seamless, real-time protection and deep AI-driven forensic analysis of suspicious links.

    2025 · urlert.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    Live extension analysis: Point us at a Chrome/Edge/Firefox extension (store URL or CRX). We spin up a safe sandbox and observe it in real time—permissions use, message passing, storage writes, network calls, remote code loading, and UI injections. Package scanning: Paste an npm/package URL or code. We do quick static + dynamic checks: install/postinstall scripts, obfuscation/eval, exfil endpoints, suspicious APIs, and typosquat/reputation signals. AI explainer: An LLM summarizes the behaviors and risk patterns in plain English (why it’s risky, what to verify,…

    2025 · browsertotal.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    Hi HN, I built CountermarkAI, a lightweight anti-scraping & bot-detection tool for content creators and website owners. It’s designed to help protect your work from unauthorized scraping and AI training, that repurposed your work without permission. How It Works: Use Hashtag – Creators add a unique hashtag to their content as a declaration of ownership. Protect Website – For those running your own sites, simply add a small snippet to your . The protect.js script works asynchronously by sending metadata from every page load back to our servers, logging requests, and flagging known AI-training…

    2025 · countermarkai.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    Filtering malicious and unwanted websites

    2024 · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    Hey HN I recently built URL Unshortener Pro, a free Chrome extension that: Expands shortened or obfuscated URLs (like bit.ly, t.co, etc) Reveals the entire redirect chain (handles HTTP, meta-refresh, JavaScript-based redirects) Flags known tracking domains Highlights and removes tracking parameters (utm_source, fbclid, etc) Works fast with smart caching 100% privacy-focused, with no tracking, ads, or external analytics. I built it out of personal frustration with opaque, tracking-heavy links on social media and news sites. Chrome Web Store link…

    2025 · chromewebstore.google.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    Hi all! We are a tiny team of two that enjoyed using del.icio.us back in the day. It was a simple and efficient tool for two things: saving urls for later, and browsing the web thanks to the tags and some other basic features. So we wondered about rebuilding it. Its been quite a ride, but we finally have a streamlined version of what we are looking for. This is www.urligram.com: a prototype for a new social bookmarking platform. We have been using it for some time, and while there is a lot of work to be done yet, we think it is stable enough to be useful. Currently you will be able to save…

    2023 · urligram.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18
    wsgrok▲7

    I built it for myself because ngrok didn't let me add one more domain unless I paid $12 more. I probably should've looked for alternatives before building my own, but my grudge got in the way . Once I started, I wanted to make it better than the other options. Silly, I know. No one probably cares. I plan to open source it sometime next year because I’ve got other projects to finish first. It's free until I deplete my cloud credits, then it will switch to a tier-based model with a free option.

    Jan 2026 · wsgrok.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    Was bored at work so I threw this together. First bash at a Node app. Built a simple Chrome extension for it too.

    2011 · github.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    Hi HN — solo developer here. I built this tool ~4 years ago purely to solve my own frustration with CORS and repeated proxy setup. The idea was intentionally boring: just prefix a URL and get control over the request and response. Somehow it grew to serving billions of requests per day, including usage by companies and universities. I’m sharing it here mainly to: - get technical feedback - learn what people would actually use a proxy like this for - understand what I should simplify or remove

    Feb 2026 · corsproxy.io · its alternatives →

  21. 21
    linkZip▲15

    Shorter links. Full control. Privacy-first.

    2025 · linkzip.ai · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    Free url shortener, qr codes, track & more - cutx.me

    2025 · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    Since the last Show HN 7 months ago, I've shipped some major updates: • Operators Directory – browse 160+ crawlers by company (Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.). See all their bots, safety stats, and official docs in one place. • Enhanced crawler profiles with "Blocking Impact" analysis and common use cases • Added 25+ new AI crawlers including latest models and scrapers • Bulk robots.txt generator – generate allow/block rules for all filtered bots in one click • RFC 9309 strict compliance – mimics Googlebot's exact "Longest Match" logic The tool now helps answer "who owns CCBot?" or…

    2025 · crawlercheck.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    Download: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hapackcnjagkljgfjlgonohbabnfgopc Source: https://github.com/ImFatYoureFat/follow_hackers I built this extension this past weekend. It uses Javascript (obviously), python (Flask) and Redis. I would love to hear any comments or suggestions.Thanks.

    2012 · chrome.google.com · its alternatives →

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