I've been writing since before we had the internet at home. I had a clunky old desktop that I'm pretty sure came to us free from a friend or for like $10 from Goodwill. I used a floppy disc to take my fanfic from home to the library where I posted it to fanfiction.net about once a week. It was paradise, tbh, and I miss it. I'm currently coming to you live from a laptop that I bought almost a decade ago. She can't do much anyomre, but she's the literal best for distraction free writing because. Well. She can only manage about two windows at once.
The point is: you can write anywhere on anything for free. You don't have to have fancy equipment to create worlds. In fact, if you're primarily a daydreamer, you can make new worlds for free with no supplies of any kind! The world is your creative oyster!
In the spirit of free ways to be creative, here are some of the free writing resources I've used over the years 
writing programs
- Obsidian.md - This is the best free alternative to Scrivener that I've found. I'm currently using it to world build and I love it.
- LibreOffice - Since Microsoft keeps doing things, it's time to find a good alternative. LibreOffice is that alternative.
- ProtonDocs - an alternative to GoogleDocs with a more robust privacy policy
editing tools
- Hemingway Editor - a free tool to see if your sentences are too wordy or you've used the word "just" 400 times (the free version does not use AI)
- A lot of editing tools these days are either AI scraping is disguise or unreliable AI based grammar checkers, so I would 100% suggest familiarizing yourself with the basic rules of grammar and punctuation so you can edit your writing yourself. This will also help your literacy and make things easier to understand while you're reading!
music for writing vibes
places to post your writing
- Archive of Our Own - The biggest and best place to post your fanfiction! It has an extensive tagging system and a very active community.
- Fanfiction.net - FF.net still exists! Somehow. It still has a semi-active community, but if you're going to post fanfiction I would recommend going with AO3 instead.
- WattPad - This list would not be complete without WattPad tbh. WattPad has more of a focus on original fiction and also has a very active community.
- Substack - Substack is a writing website based around mailing lists. It's more of a place for personal essays, opinion pieces, and pretension - but! There are people who use it to publish their work one chapter at a time. There's also a monitization feature if you're looking to get some extra income from your original work.
- Tumblr - It would be remiss of me to not mention Tumblr in this list. There are a lot of people publishing both short and full length works on their blogs there. It's how I originally found with author of Morning Glory Milking Farm and read some of her original short work. (Unrelated, but Katrina Van Tassel & the Headless Horseman was fantastic and I loved it far more than I should have.)
More to come!