The honest answer about free fonts for web design is: Google Fonts is excellent and you should use it without shame. Inter is the most-used body typeface on the web for a reason; Fraunces is a display face with genuine character; DM Sans, Instrument Sans, and Raleway are all genuinely good. The reason to look beyond Google Fonts isn’t that it’s bad, it’s that everyone else is using the same pool.
Here are the less-obvious sources, with notes on what each is good for.
Adobe Fonts (included with Creative Cloud subscriptions). About 40% of professional designers already have CC subscriptions and don’t use Adobe Fonts. The selection includes serious retail families that cost hundreds of dollars to license individually: the full Aktiv Grotesk family, Freight Display, Proxima Nova, Source Han Sans. For projects where you have a CC subscription, checking Adobe Fonts before purchasing a retail license is always worth 15 minutes.
The League of Moveable Type. An older but still useful source of OFL-licensed type that was designed with quality as the primary goal. Chunk Five, Junction, and League Gothic were commissioned or curated with real design intent. Not trendy, but solid.
Velvetyne Type Foundry. A Paris-based cooperative that releases experimental and high-quality typefaces under open licenses. If you need a typeface that looks like nothing else on the web, Velvetyne is worth an hour of browsing. Faces here tend toward the expressive end; not everything is usable for body copy, but the display faces are genuinely distinctive.
Fontsource. Not a type foundry but an aggregator that packages Google Fonts, Adobe’s open-source families, and other OFL fonts as self-hosted npm packages. The practical value is self-hosting with a single npm install, which eliminates the Google Fonts privacy concerns for GDPR-sensitive European clients and removes the inter-origin request.
Lost Type. A pay-what-you-want cooperative founded in 2011. The selection is smaller but the design quality is higher than most free sources. The intended minimum is $5/font for personal use; anything commercial should be treated as a real license purchase. Lavanderia, Chunk, and Wisdom Script are all worth knowing.
For teams with no budget and no CC subscription: Inter for body, Plus Jakarta Sans or Fraunces for display, JetBrains Mono for code. That stack is free, well-made, and covers 90% of use cases.