Off Site Resources

Useful external tools, references, and communities for VRChat creators. These are third-party resources we recommend - we are not affiliated with them.

VRChat Documentation

Official VRChat creator docs covering avatars, worlds, Udon, networking, and the VRChat SDK.

Visit docs »

Booth.pm

The primary marketplace for VRChat avatar bases, accessories, clothing, and other assets from independent creators.

Browse assets »

VRCX

Feature-rich VRChat companion app for Windows. Track friends, browse worlds, manage favorites, view instance history, and get desktop notifications.

Get VRCX »

Blender

Free, open-source 3D modeling software used by most VRChat avatar creators for modeling, rigging, and weight painting.

Download Blender »

Unity Hub

Unity is the game engine that powers VRChat content. You need it to build and upload avatars and worlds.

Get Unity »

Poiyomi Shaders

The most popular community shader for VRChat avatars. Feature-rich with toon shading, outlines, emissions, and more.

Get Poiyomi »

Cats Blender Plugin

Blender addon for VRChat avatar optimization. Fixes common issues, merges meshes, creates atlases, and decimates models.

View on GitHub »

VRChat Discord

The official VRChat community Discord server. Get help, share work, and connect with other creators.

Join Discord »

VRChat Feedback

Official feature request and bug report board. Vote on ideas and track what the VRChat team is working on.

Submit feedback »

VRChat Creator Tools

Essential free Unity plugins and tools built specifically for VRChat avatar and world creation. All are non-destructive and integrate with the VRChat SDK.

Creator Companion

Official entry point for VRChat creation. Manages Unity installation, VRChat SDK packages, and curated community packages via VPM.

Get VCC »

Avatar Optimizer

Non-destructive avatar optimization for Unity. Reduces draw calls, merges materials, removes unused bones, and optimizes meshes at build time.

Get AAO »

VRCFury

Non-destructive avatar plugin with toggle builder, clothing attacher, gesture manager, and controller merger. Changes only apply at upload.

Get VRCFury »

Modular Avatar

Drag-and-drop avatar assembly toolkit. Attach accessories, clothing, and animation systems non-destructively without touching animator controllers.

Get MA »

AudioLink

Audio-reactive system for VRChat. Analyzes in-world audio and exposes frequency data to Udon, world shaders, and avatar shaders. Essential for DJ worlds.

Get AudioLink »

Gesture Manager

Preview and edit VRChat avatar animations directly in Unity without needing to Build & Test. Saves hours of iteration time.

Get plugin »

Free Creator Software

Free desktop and browser-based tools for 3D modeling, texturing, painting, audio editing, and animation — everything you need to create VR content.

VRoid Studio

Anime-style 3D character creator by Pixiv. Customize hair, face, body, and outfits with sliders. Exports VRM format for use with VRChat converters.

Download »

Mixamo

Free auto-rigging and animation library by Adobe. Upload a character, auto-rig it, and apply thousands of motion-capture animations. Exports FBX.

Open Mixamo »

Cascadeur

AI-assisted physics-based keyframe animation software. AutoPosing and ragdoll simulation produce realistic animations. Free tier with no time limit.

Download »

GIMP

Full-featured open-source image editor. Create and edit textures, UV maps, and normal maps. Supports DDS format with plugins.

Download »

Krita

Open-source digital painting app with excellent brush engine for hand-painting stylized textures. Exports PNG, PSD, and other game-ready formats.

Download »

Audacity

Open-source multi-track audio editor and recorder. Record, edit, and export audio in WAV, MP3, FLAC, OGG for VR world sound effects and ambient audio.

Download »

Photopea

Browser-based image editor with a Photoshop-like interface. Full layer support, PSD compatibility, and standard editing tools. No install required.

Open Photopea »

Material Maker

Open-source procedural texture authoring tool. Node-based editor for crafting PBR materials exportable to Unity, Unreal, and Godot.

Download »

MagicaVoxel

Free voxel art editor and path-tracing renderer. Build 3D scenes from voxel blocks and export for Unity. Great for stylized VR world assets.

Download »

Free Asset Libraries

Royalty-free and Creative Commons licensed 3D models, textures, sounds, and game assets. Most require no signup and have no usage restrictions.

Kenney Assets

Thousands of CC0 2D/3D/audio game assets. Professional quality props, UI elements, and models usable in any project without attribution.

Browse assets »

OpenGameArt

Community-driven platform for free game assets including 3D models, textures, sprites, and audio under Creative Commons and public domain licenses.

Browse assets »

Freesound

Collaborative database of 685,000+ Creative Commons audio clips. Over 315,000 sounds are CC0. Covers ambient, effects, music loops, and more.

Browse sounds »

Unity Asset Store

Unity's official marketplace has a dedicated free section with VR-compatible assets, tools, plugins, models, environments, and shaders.

Free assets »

CGBookcase

Free PBR textures with all map types — albedo, normal, roughness, AO, and more. 100% free with no restrictions on use. Ready for Unity and Blender.

Browse textures »

FreePBR

600+ free PBR material texture sets ready for use in Unity, Unreal, and Blender. All maps included — albedo, normal, metallic, roughness, and AO.

Browse textures »

Public API Endpoints

Free APIs that VR creators can integrate into their tools, scripts, and workflows. These are third-party services â€” check each provider's terms before use in production.

VRChat Community API

Community-documented REST API for VRChat covering avatars, worlds, users, groups, and more. SDKs available for C#, Python, JavaScript, Java, Dart, and Rust.

View docs »

Poly Haven API

Public REST API serving 2,000+ CC0-licensed HDRIs, PBR textures, and 3D models. No authentication required. Perfect for world building and avatar materials.

View docs »

Poly Pizza API

REST API for thousands of free low-poly 3D models under CC-BY license. No login required. Great for prototyping VR worlds and environments.

View docs »

Sketchfab Data API

Search and download 700,000+ Creative Commons 3D models in glTF and GLB formats. Free account required for downloads. Includes model metadata and thumbnails.

View docs »

ambientCG API

REST API for 2,000+ CC0 PBR materials, HDRIs, and 3D models. No authentication needed. Returns metadata and direct download links in JSON or CSV.

View docs »

TinyPNG API

Image compression API supporting PNG, JPEG, WebP, and AVIF. 500 free compressions per month. Useful for optimizing textures before uploading to VRChat.

View docs »

GenPBR API

Generate PBR texture maps â€” normal, metallic, roughness, ambient occlusion, and height â€” from source images via REST API. Free tier available for testing.

View docs »

remove.bg API

AI-powered automatic background removal from images. 50 free API calls per month. Perfect for cleaning up texture source images.

View docs »

Cloudinary API

Image and video transformation, optimization, and CDN delivery via API. Free: 25 credits/month covering ~25,000 transformations or 25 GB bandwidth.

View docs »

Freesound API

Search and download from 685,000+ Creative Commons audio clips. Content-based similarity search and auto feature extraction. 2,000 requests/day free.

View docs »

Hugging Face API

Access thousands of open-source AI models — image generation, text generation, object detection, text-to-speech, and more. Free credits included.

View docs »

Pexels API

Access curated high-quality stock photos and videos. 20,000 requests/month free. No attribution required. Great for reference textures and backgrounds.

View docs »

Open-Meteo API

Global weather forecasts, 80 years of historical data, air quality, and elevation. 10,000 calls/day free. No API key required. Great for dynamic VR world weather.

View docs »

NASA APIs

Astronomy Picture of the Day, Mars Rover photos, Near-Earth Objects, and Earth imagery. 1,000 requests/hour with free API key. Useful for VR skyboxes.

View docs »

DeepL API Free

High-quality neural machine translation for 30+ languages. 500,000 characters/month free. Useful for localizing VR world text and UI elements.

View docs »

DiceBear API

Generate SVG avatars deterministically from a seed string. Multiple art styles including pixel art and abstract. Free, no key required. Great for user profiles.

View docs »

Colormind API

AI-powered color palette generation trained on real artwork and film. Returns 5-color palettes with optional partial input. Free, no key required.

View docs »

Google Fonts API

Query metadata for 1,500+ font families. Font CSS serving is unlimited with no key needed. 10,000+ API calls/day for metadata queries.

View docs »

Free Credits & Freebies

Cloud providers and developer platforms that offer free credits, always-free tiers, or generous signup bonuses. Ideal for hosting VR project sites, running build pipelines, or storing assets without spending a dime.

Microsoft Azure

$200 free credit for 30 days, 25+ services free for 12 months, and always-free tiers on many services. Students get $100 with no credit card required.

Google Cloud Platform

$300 free credit for 90 days plus always-free tiers on Compute Engine, BigQuery, Cloud Functions, and more. No charges until you manually upgrade.

Amazon Web Services

Up to $200 in credits ($100 at signup, $100 earned by exploring services), 30+ always-free services, and a 6-month free plan for new accounts.

Oracle Cloud Always Free

Permanently free ARM VMs (4 OCPU, 24 GB RAM), 200 GB block storage, Autonomous Database, and object storage. No time limit, no credit card gotchas.

Cloudflare Free Tier

Free CDN, DNS, DDoS protection, Workers (100k requests/day), Pages (unlimited bandwidth, 500 builds/month), and KV storage. No credit card needed.

Netlify Free Tier

Free static hosting with 100 GB bandwidth, 300 build minutes, 125k serverless function calls, unlimited deploy previews, custom domains, and SSL. No card required.

GitHub Student Pack

100+ free developer tools for verified students: GitHub Pro, Copilot, JetBrains IDEs, DigitalOcean credits, Azure credits, domains, and more.

Apply »

JetBrains Free IDEs

Rider, CLion, WebStorm, RustRover, and more are free for non-commercial use. Students and open-source maintainers get full Ultimate licenses at no cost.

Get free license »

IBM Cloud

40+ always-free Lite plan products plus $200 signup credit for 30 days. Includes 25 GB object storage, Watson AI APIs, and Cloud Foundry apps.

VPS & Compute Providers

Smaller and mid-size cloud providers with generous signup credits for hosting, compute, and storage.

Hetzner Cloud

€20 free credit on signup. German-engineered VPS starting at €3.79/mo with excellent performance. Popular for game servers, builds, and hosting.

Vultr

Up to $300 free credit for new accounts (30 days). 32 datacenter locations worldwide with bare metal, cloud compute, and managed databases.

DigitalOcean

$200 free credit for 60 days. Simple, developer-friendly cloud with Droplets, App Platform, managed databases, and Kubernetes. Students get $200 for 1 year.

Linode (Akamai)

$100 free credit for 60 days. Straightforward Linux VPS hosting with block storage, object storage, NodeBalancers, and one-click apps.

OVHcloud

Up to $300 in Public Cloud credits for 90 days. European provider with VPS, dedicated servers, managed Kubernetes, and object storage.

Scaleway

€100 free credit for new Business accounts. French cloud provider with Instances, Kubernetes, serverless functions, and GPU instances.

App Hosting & PaaS

Deploy apps and sites for free with these platform-as-a-service providers.

Render

Free web services (750 hrs/mo), free PostgreSQL (1 GB), and free static sites. No credit card required, never expires, commercial use allowed.

Vercel

Free Hobby plan with 100 GB bandwidth, unlimited deploys, serverless functions, and edge functions. Great for frontend sites and Next.js projects. No card needed.

Koyeb

Free web service (512 MB RAM, 0.1 vCPU) and free PostgreSQL database in Frankfurt or Washington D.C. No credit card required, never expires.

Railway

$5 free trial credit for 30 days, then $1/month free on the Free plan. Deploy from GitHub with databases, cron jobs, and private networking.

Deno Deploy

Free edge serverless: 100k requests/day, 100 GB outbound/month, 1 GB KV storage. 35+ global regions, instant deploys, TypeScript-native. No card needed.

Coolify

Open-source, self-hosted PaaS alternative to Vercel/Heroku/Netlify. Deploy on your own server with full control. Free forever, all features included.

Get Coolify »

GitHub Pages

Unlimited free static site hosting from GitHub repos. 1 GB storage, 100 GB/month bandwidth, free SSL, and custom domains. No card needed.

Cloudflare Pages

Unlimited sites and bandwidth, 500 builds/month, serverless functions via Workers integration. No credit card required.

Northflank

Always-on sandbox tier with 2 free services, 2 free databases, and 2 free cron jobs. No credit card required.

Zeabur

Serverless plan with $5 monthly credit, up to 1 vCPU and 2 GB memory per service. Unlimited projects and services. No card needed.

Back4App

Free container hosting with 100 GB transfer, 256 MB RAM, and shared CPU. Also offers BaaS with Parse Server. No credit card required.

Firebase

Free Spark plan: 2M Cloud Functions invocations/month, 10 GB hosting storage, 1 GB Firestore, 50K auth MAUs. Analytics and Crashlytics fully free.

Free Databases

Managed database services with generous free tiers — no credit card required for most.

Supabase

Free forever: 500 MB Postgres, 1 GB file storage, 50k monthly active users, auth, realtime, edge functions. Two active projects, no card needed.

Neon

Serverless Postgres that scales to zero. Free: 100 projects, 0.5 GB storage/branch, 100 compute-hours/month. No card required, never expires.

Turso

SQLite at the edge via libSQL. Free: 500 databases, 9 GB storage, 500 million row reads/month. Ultra-low latency, globally replicated.

MongoDB Atlas

Free forever M0 cluster: 512 MB storage, shared RAM, automatic backups. Great for document-based data like avatar catalogs or event listings.

TiDB Serverless

MySQL-compatible serverless database. Free: 25 GB row storage, 25 GB columnar storage, 250M request units/month across up to 5 clusters. No card needed.

Upstash

Serverless Redis with 256 MB data, 500k commands/month free. Pay-per-request after that. Also offers serverless Kafka and QStash message queues.

CockroachDB

Distributed SQL database. Free forever: 10 GB storage, 50M Request Units/month. No surprise bills — you set resource limits. No card needed.

Appwrite Cloud

Open-source BaaS. Free: 2 projects, 750K function executions/month, unlimited database reads/writes, 3 storage buckets, and built-in auth. No card needed.

Xata

Serverless Postgres with 15 GB storage, no cold starts, and no pausing on inactivity. Includes pgvector for AI embeddings. No card required.

Convex

Reactive backend with 1M function calls, 20 GB-hours compute, file storage, and real-time sync. Up to 6 developers, 20 projects. No card needed.

Neo4j AuraDB

Free graph database: 50,000 nodes, 175,000 relationships. No time limit, no trial. Great for mapping social connections or world relationships.

PocketBase

Free open-source backend in a single Go binary. SQLite database, auth, real-time API, file storage, and admin UI. Self-host on any VPS.

Get PocketBase »

Free Object Storage

Store textures, models, builds, and backups in the cloud for free.

Backblaze B2

10 GB free storage forever, no credit card required. S3-compatible API. Beyond free tier, just $6/TB/month — 1/5 the cost of AWS S3.

Wasabi

1 TB free for 30 days trial, no credit card needed and no auto-renewal. S3-compatible hot storage at $6.99/TB/month after trial, no egress fees.

Cloudflare R2

10 GB free storage, 1M writes/month, 10M reads/month. S3-compatible with zero egress fees at any scale. No credit card required.

Tebi.io

25 GB free storage, 250 GB traffic/month. Data replicated in 2 copies. S3-compatible API. No credit card required.

IDrive e2

10 GB free permanent storage with no egress fees. Download up to 3x your storage per month free. S3-compatible API. No card needed.

Tigris

5 GB free storage, zero egress fees globally. S3-compatible API by Fly.io. Auto-caches objects near users for low latency. No card needed.

GPU Compute

Cloud GPU providers for AI workloads, lightmap baking, and heavy compute tasks.

RunPod

Spend $10, get a random bonus of $5–$500. GPU instances from $0.20/hr (spot). Startup program offers matched credits up to $25k.

Vast.ai

GPU marketplace with H100s from $0.90/hr. Startup program offers $2,500 in free GPU credits. Consumer-grade cards available for under $5/deploy.

Google Colab

Free GPU notebooks (NVIDIA T4) with sessions up to 12 hours. No credit card needed. Great for AI experiments and lightmap baking scripts.

Open Colab »

Kaggle Notebooks

30 hours/week of free GPU time (NVIDIA P100, 16 GB). 9-hour max session, 20 GB persistent storage, plus 20 hours/week TPU time. No card needed.

Open Kaggle »

Lightning.ai

22 free GPU hours/month (T4, L4, A10G options), 1 free 4-CPU Studio running 24/7, and 10 GB free storage. No credit card required.

Paperspace Gradient

Free GPU notebooks with 6-hour sessions, minimum 8 vCPUs and 30 GB RAM. Persistent storage between sessions. No credit card required.

Free AI Inference

Run large language models and AI workloads for free on custom hardware — no GPU required on your end.

Cerebras

Free tier with Llama 3.3 70B, Qwen3 32B, and more on wafer-scale hardware. 30 RPM, 1M tokens/day. 20x faster than NVIDIA GPUs. No card needed.

Groq

Free tier on custom LPU hardware — the fastest inference available. Rate-limited access to all supported models. No credit card needed.

SambaNova Cloud

Persistent free tier for Llama 3.3 70B, Llama 3.1 405B, and Qwen 2.5 72B on custom RDU hardware. 10–30 RPM. No credit card needed.

OpenRouter

29 completely free models including DeepSeek V3, Llama 3.3 70B, and more. One API key accesses dozens of providers. 20 req/min, 200 req/day.

Google AI Studio

Free Gemini API access: Gemini 2.5 Pro (5 RPM), Flash (10 RPM), Flash-Lite (15 RPM). 250K tokens/minute. No credit card needed.

Open Studio »

Together AI

$5 free credit for new accounts. Access to 200+ open-source models including Llama, DeepSeek, and Mixtral. No credit card needed.

Free Email Services

Transactional email APIs with free tiers — send password resets, notifications, and contact form messages.

Resend

3,000 emails/month free (100/day cap), 1 domain, full API + React Email templates. Marketing: 1,000 contacts with unlimited sends. No card needed.

Brevo

300 emails/day (~9,000/month) free forever. 100,000 contacts, CRM, and drag-and-drop editor included. No credit card required.

SMTP2GO

1,000 emails/month free (200/day), 5 sender domains. No time limit. SMTP + API access. Positioned as a SendGrid free-tier replacement.

Free Authentication

Drop-in auth services with social login, MFA, and pre-built UI components — no card required.

Clerk

50,000 monthly retained users free. Pre-built UI components, social login, MFA, and webhooks. No credit card required.

Auth0

7,500 monthly active users free. Social connections, passwordless login, and MFA basics included. No credit card required.

SuperTokens

Self-hosted: completely free, unlimited users. Managed cloud: 5,000 MAU free. Open-source with full auth features. No card needed.

Free Monitoring & CI/CD

Observability platforms and build pipelines with generous free tiers.

Grafana Cloud

10K active metrics, 50 GB logs, 50K traces, 3 users, 13-month metrics retention. Forever free, no credit card required.

New Relic

1 full platform user, 100 GB/month data ingest. Full-stack observability with APM, logs, and infrastructure monitoring. Forever free.

GitHub Actions

2,000 build minutes/month for private repos, unlimited for public repos. Linux, macOS, and Windows runners. No credit card required.

Learn more »

Free Image & Media Hosting

Image transformation, optimization, and CDN delivery with free API access.

Cloudinary

25 credits/month covering ~25 GB storage, 25 GB bandwidth, or 25,000 transformations. Image and video CDN. No credit card needed.

ImageKit.io

20 GB bandwidth/month, 20 GB storage. Unlimited image transformations via URL parameters. Hard stop on overage, never billed. No card needed.

Uploadcare

3 GB traffic/month, 1 GB storage, basic image transformations via URL API. CDN-delivered with no credit card required.