With all due respect to SaaS businesses, App developers. We love what you create. But let’s be honest, for Small businesses, just starting out, and Freelancers, the budget is usually tight. The best softwares to use for businesses, come with a big monthly price tag. And no doubt, they are worth every penny. But to start with, sometimes we need the free stuff.
Here are some of the Best and Free apps for Small Businesses just starting out, wanting to save some monthly costs.
I have no affiliation. None. I am just a happy customer of most of these that I used to scale both my businesses over the years. Hopefully this helps you too.
Watch the YouTube video I made about this, Or read below, if you’re old school.
1. Kitchen
Kitchen.co replaced multiple software licenses for me when I started Sundeck.Studio. I replaced Jira, Confluence, Google Drive, Invoicing softwares and more with this one platform. Kitchen gives you a custom branded (paid) Client portal or a Free client portal (Kitchen.co branded), it has a free invoicing software for small businesses, Free Project management tools like Kanban and other views, and so much more. What I love the most that it has a life-time plan. Which means you pay once and that’s it.
2. Eversign
I use this for getting clients’ signature on contracts and other legal documents. Eversign is a free signature tool that removes the hassle of downloading weird PDF softwares. Clients get the contracts in email, they sign it in browser. Eversign creates audit trail, sends notifications and collects legally binding contracts. Easy peasy.
3. Zoho
If you live in New Zealand or Australia, you must have heard of Xero. What you may not know of is Zoho. Which is atleast 10 times bigger, better and older than Xero. By no means Xero is bad. It has alot of useful features. Zoho however gives an entry point for small businesses too who want to get on the free train. It has sub-divisions for invoicing, client portals, accounting just to name a few of many features it has, most of them with a free tier too. There are perks with paid plans though. Zoho has an amazing eco-system where you can manage your entire businesses in one place. I found out about it, not from Google or some tech-chats. But from a clothing store in Jumeirah, in Dubai who was using it for their invoicing.
4. Storj
With a very generous free-tier cloud storage, Storj has replaced Google drive and Dropbox for me. Its securer, faster and cheaper. I love how they distribute your file into 40 smaller pieces for security and faster downloads and when you re-download them they all come together to form one high speed download. Like some high-security code with it’s pieces in different parts of the world, avoiding a single point of failure. Its also interesting to see how it shows you where all your files are stored. But most importantly, it has a lot more storage in its free tier.
5. Lightshot and CleanShot
Two seperate apps. Earlier I used Lightshot (which is a Chrome plugin) to take and share screenshots. However recently it’s been not the most reliable one. So I am planning to switch to CleanShot mac app, which has a lifetime purchase plan. These are super handy if you share screenshots with annotations amongst your team or clients.
Hopefully you can benefit from these like I did. If you have any other suggested apps, drop them in the comments in my YouTube video.
Cheers.