OUR FAVOURITE 
EASY & LOW-COST

TECH TOOLS

FOR SMALL BUSINESSES & FREELANCERS.

It is a gift and a curse that we have so many thousands of apps to choose from to build our businesses. But who has time to test them all? We've tested a lot, so here's our top recommendations for business operations, finances, marketing and sales, and more. Our criteria:

• Free or low-cost per month
• Easy-to-use and learn with ample online resources
• Tried and tested by us
• Integrates with other apps

Note: a few of the apps are marked with an (*), that means we've shared an affiliate link below and may receive a discount on our subscription if you sign up. 

JUST GETTING STARTED?

• ☁️ Access your everything, everywhere: Google Workspace for your gmail, calendar, cloud storage, files, presentations.
• 🔖 Register your business in Canada with: Ownr* starts at $40 for sole proprietorship.
• 🔒 Get business insurance: Zensurance. Starts at $19/mo.
• 🕸️ Build your first website on: Wix starting at $16/month
• 🌊 Manage your business finances and invoicing clients with WaveApps $0-20/mo + payment processing fees.
• 💸 Accept almost any payment type with Stripe for $0, but 2.9% + $0.30 fees on each transaction.

FOR MANAGING 

YOUR PROJECTS AND IDEAS

Get a project management system that works for you, there are a lot of great one's out there, and all of these start with free plans.

• 🧠 Notion* my favourite second brain - dump all ideas and plans into Notion.
• 📮 Monday* my favourite for managing clients, projects, payments, and more in one place.
• 🧘‍♀️Asana: less for client data, more for projects, processes, collaboration.
• 🆙 Clickup: another one that goes deeply into planning projects and collaborating with others on them.

KEEP TRACK OF

LEADS AND CLIENTS

(Almost) everyone business owner needs a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system (or vendor relationships, or partner relations, etc). There are hundreds, and many can get expensive. Our favourites that are actually designed and priced for small businesses:

• 😃Folk*: if you love Notion but know it's CRM abilities are limited, meet folk. Looks like Notion, operates like butter, can pull contact info from gmail, Linkedin, and any browser. $0-24/mo.
• 💊 Capsule*: if you're just getting started, Capsule is a great option. Clean, simple, easy to learn. $0-21/mo.
• 📮 Monday*: it's rare for a CRM to actually do project management well and vice versa. Monday does it the best. $63/mo but free plan coming soon?!

Then, add on some of these tools to impress your clients:

• 🗓️ Calendly: great for appointment bookings - even accept payments for consulting time. $0-10/mo.
• 🚀 Fireflies: your AI assistant to summarize client meetings for you. $0-18/mo
• ✍🏾 Contracts via e-signature.io at $1.39 per document

AUTOMATE SOME 

OF YOUR MARKETING

• 🖼️ Canva: for all of your creative and branded assets. $0-18.99 and I have to say the upgraded plan is worth it for the AI features, easy resizing, and free stock photos, videos and audio.
• 💬 ChatGPT if you're not a writer and want to generate some ideas for blog content, website content. Have ChatGPT write it for you, then you review, edit, and make it your own. $0-20/mo
• 👯 Tailwinds* ($0-15/mo) or Buffer ($0-6mo) to schedule your social media content and get ideas, inspiration and analytics.
• ✉️ Mailerlite* ($0-9/mo) for email marketing and automations to nurture your leads.