https://archive.org/details/us_census
You will find there a listing of every US census since the first one in 1790 (well, every surviving one anyway). They are scans from the Allen County Public Library's microfilm, organized by year, state, and microfilm roll. If you have a quality source citation or know the state and county, it's pretty easy to find the page you're looking for and then just save off a jpg of the page. Or if you really want you can grab a PDF of the whole thing. No subscription required.
This is also an easy way to browse the pages before and after the page where your ancestors appear to dig for more clues about their lives and the communities where they lived.
While you're on archive.org (one of my favorite websites) you should also check out their Genealogy collection. There are hundreds of great resources you can check out without having to leave home!
Thanks for the tip. Family Search, which is free, has the index, but not the census images. The indexing was done perhaps a little too quickly, and it's a good idea to be creative with possible alternative spellings or even names when searching. I find this useful when tracing origins or migrations. Also, I found out recently that many states have digitized indexes and images of census sheets for their state, as well as for state censuses if they had them. Sometimes these are linked with other sources as well.
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