Free tools that give you an honest answer

We built these over the years because the opening minutes of a new client conversation kept covering identical ground. Someone would ask whether their email was secure, or whether the eight-year-old machine in accounting was worth fixing, and the honest answer required data neither of us had yet. Rather than guessing on a phone call, we made the checks self-service. Every one of them is free, and none of them hold the result hostage behind a signup form.

Exposure and security checks

This is the largest group, and the most eye-opening for most people. The dark web scan and breach check tell you whether credentials tied to your domain are already circulating from someone else's breach, which is how the majority of account takeovers begin. The email security check examines your SPF, DKIM and DMARC records, the three DNS entries that determine whether a stranger can send mail that appears to come from your company. Most small business domains fail at least one of them.

The email header analyzer takes the raw headers from a suspicious message and shows you the real sending path, which settles the is-this-real argument in about ten seconds. Scam check does the same job for the message body and the request itself. Lookalike domain finder surfaces registered domains designed to be mistaken for yours, a swapped letter, an added hyphen, which are the raw material for invoice fraud. And phishing test lets you see how your own team responds to a simulated lure before a real one arrives.

Readiness and compliance assessments

These are structured self-assessments rather than scans. IT risk score gives you a single posture number across backup, patching, identity and access. Ransomware readiness asks the only question that matters in an incident: could you restore and keep trading without paying anyone? Cyber insurance check mirrors the control questions carriers now put on renewal applications, which have become far stricter than most business owners expect. HIPAA readiness walks the technical safeguards specifically, and is the one our medical and dental clients use most.

Network, hardware and financial tools

The practical group. Speed test shows what your circuit actually delivers, which is frequently not what the bill says. Uptime checker confirms whether a site or service is genuinely down or just down for you. Windows 11 readiness checks TPM, Secure Boot and CPU generation so you know which machines can move and which need replacing, a live question now that Windows 10 support has ended. Fix or replace weighs a repair against the cost of new hardware. Downtime cost calculator converts an outage into dollars per hour, which is usually the number that ends an internal debate about backup spending. And IT cost calculator compares in-house support against managed coverage honestly, including the costs people forget.

Two more are simply useful day to day. Our secure password generator page explains the strategy behind strong credentials and links to the live generator, and signature generator builds clean, consistent email signatures for a whole team without anyone having to fight with HTML.

Run whichever applies and act on the result. If a tool tells you something worrying and you are not sure what to do about it, send us the output. We will tell you what it means in plain English, and what we would fix first if it were our business. That conversation is free, and it comes with no obligation, details on how we quote are on our estimates page.

A number beats an opinion. Run the check before you argue about the budget.Orca IT, Gilbert AZ