Not every SaaS company has endless spare money.
It might be because you’re bootstrapped. It might be because you have a limited runway. Maybe you just enjoy really thinking about what you spend your hard earned dough on.
When we think about what SaaS companies spend on, we tend to consider the big things:
- Office costs
- Hiring and salaries
- Equipment
- Taxes
Fundera has a great list of 14 common small business startup costs if you want to think about these common things more.
However—the one cost that often slips our mind is the tools we use in our everyday work.
Tool costs are easy to not think of as a “big thing”. SaaS companies tend to use a lot of tools for their everyday operations. Most of them aren’t outrageously expensive.
So, what’s another 20 bucks a month for a service that makes your life easier? However, how many of these “only 20 bucks a month” tools do you already have? Do you know?
It adds up. Big time.
We all want quality tools to run our business, even if we’re on a budget. That doesn’t mean you have to necessarily empty your pockets for it.
Canny is a fully bootstrapped company. We know exactly what it’s like to be mindful with money.
So—in today’s post, we’re going to do two things:
1. Look at the main operating areas of a SaaS company, and list some free (or cheap) tools to use
2. Provide you with a pre-formatted spreadsheet for easy calculations of what your tool costs really are, all combined (and what they could be)
See the budgeting spreadsheetYou can make a copy of this spreadsheet, and then use it for either:
- Building your starter toolkit as a company just about to launch, so you can predict future costs
- Analyze your current toolkit costs as a fully operational company, and see where you can improve
Let’s roll!
The SaaS tool categories
We’re going to be looking at the following big categories for SaaS tools:
Marketing and external communication
Customer support
Task management
Documentation
Metrics/analytics
Design
Engineering
… and list a few options that have a free plan.
We’re not going to go into super hacky alternative options for saving money (e.g maybe you can just use a Google Doc for team chat?). Nobody has time for that.
But, hopefully you will find some new and cool (and free!) tools to check out.
PS: there’s a little ♥ next to the tools we use or have used and/or would recommend. If you have questions about our experience with them, you’re welcome to reach out to us!
Internal communication
♥ Slack
Free plan: yes
Entry level pricing: $6.67 per active user/per month
Pricing page
Third party reviews
♥ Twist
Free plan: yes
Entry level pricing: $5 per user/per month
Pricing page
Third party reviews
Fleep
Free plan: yes
Entry level pricing: $5.60 per user/per month
Pricing page
Third party reviews
Marketing and external communication
Communication
♥ Missive
Free plan: yes
Entry level pricing: $10 per member/per month
Pricing page
Third party reviews
♥ MailChimp
Free plan: yes
Entry level pricing: $9.99/month
Pricing page
Third party reviews
EmailOctopus
Free plan: yes
Entry level pricing: $19
Pricing page
Third party reviews
Hubspot’s email marketing tool
Free plan: yes
Entry level pricing: $800 for the entire marketing hub
Pricing page
Third party reviews
Social media management
♥ Buffer
Free plan: yes
Entry level pricing: $15/month (1 user)
Pricing page
Third party reviews
HootSuite
Free plan: yes
Entry level pricing: $29/month (1 user)
Pricing page
Third party reviews
Customer support
Tickets
FreshDesk
Free plan: yes
Entry level pricing: $15 per agent/per month
Pricing page
Third party reviews
Zoho Desk
Free plan: yes
Entry level pricing: $12 per agent/per month
Pricing page
Third party reviews
NPS
♥ Wootric
Free plan: yes
Entry level pricing: $89/month
Pricing page
Third party reviews
Delighted
Free plan: yes
Entry level pricing: $89/month
Pricing page
Third party reviews
CRM
HubSpot CRM
Free plan: yes
Entry level pricing: none
Pricing page
Third party reviews
Task management
♥ ClickUp
Free plan: yes
Entry level pricing: $5 per user/per month
Pricing page
Third party reviews
Trello
Free plan: yes
Entry level pricing: $9.99 per user/per month
Pricing page
Third party reviews
Asana
Free plan: yes
Entry level pricing: $9.25 per user/per month
Pricing page
Third party reviews
Documentation
♥ Notion
Free plan: yes
Entry level pricing: $8 per member/per month
Pricing page
Third party reviews
♥ Xtensio
Free plan: Yes
Entry level pricing: $50/month (2 users)
Pricing page
Third party reviews
Metrics/analytics
♥ Profitwell
Free plan: yes
Entry level pricing: free
Pricing page
Third party reviews
ChartMogul
Free plan: yes
Entry level pricing: $100/month
Pricing page
Third party reviews
♥ Airtable
Free plan: yes
Entry level pricing: $10 per user/per month
Pricing page
Third party reviews
♥ Mixpanel
Free plan: yes
Entry level pricing: $779/year
Pricing page
Third party reviews
Design
♥ Figma
Free plan: yes
Entry level pricing: $12 per editor/per month
Pricing page
Third party reviews
Invision Studio
Free plan: yes
Entry level pricing: free
Landing page
Third party reviews
Wake
Free plan: yes
Entry level pricing: enterprise, custom price
Pricing page
Third party reviews
Engineering
Cloud Services
♥ Amazon Web Services
Free plan: yes
Entry level pricing: custom
Page about free tier
Cloudflare
Free plan: yes
Entry level pricing: $20/month
Pricing page
Third party reviews
Google Cloud Platform
Free plan: yes
Entry level pricing: custom
Page about free tier
Third party reviews
Code Editing
♥ Atom
Free plan: yes
Entry level pricing: free
Pricing page
Third party reviews
Sublime Text
Free plan: yes
Entry level pricing: $80
Purchase page
Third party reviews
Visual Studio Code
Free plan: yes
Entry level pricing: free
Pricing page
Third party reviews
Code Repository
♥ GitHub
Free plan: yes
Entry level pricing: $9 per user/per month
Pricing page
Third party reviews
GitLab
Free plan: yes
Entry level pricing: $4 per user/per month
Pricing page
Third party reviews
Error Reporting
♥ Sentry
Free plan: yes
Entry level pricing: $26 a month
Pricing page
Third party reviews
Happy budgeting!
Hopefully you found some new, cool, and wallet-friendly SaaS tools to check out for your team.
Have anything awesome to add to the list? Let us know!
Oh, and don’t forget to check out that budgeting spreadsheet.
For affiliate marketing, ReferDigital.com could be added to this list – it doesn’t have any sign up or monthly fees. It charges only a fraction of actual commissions earned on sales from affiliates (no sales, nothing due).
Great list, thank you I actually didn’t know about some of these!
All the best with Canny!
I like Rollbar as well for error reporting. It’s not quite as fancy as Sentry but it gets the job done!
Discord definitely deserves a place in the Internal communication section
So Azure does not qualify as a valid cloud service option?
Actually, Zoho has integrated suite with 1 dollar per month per user for all tools including CRM, Helpdesk, Docs, HRM, Finance, Marketing, Mail, Analytics, Business process and lot more as an integrated tool. Also, they provide free tools in some applications up to 5 users.
https://www.zoho.com/one/
For virtual bug testing you can add https://w3dart.com/ to your list.
It has free plan and starting price of $19/Month for unlimited users.
Very interesting , good job and thanks for sharing such a good blog. Thanks
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