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Welcome to Startup Groundwork, the place to research the building blocks of your business.
If you’re a solo or bootstrapped business, sometimes you need a little help getting off the ground. That’s where we come in. We’ve compiled a list of the best options for free services from some of the biggest names out there.
We’ve organized the list by category. If there are multiple free choices, we’ve picked our top choices or the one that includes the most features in the free tier.
Free Website: Weebly, Google My Business, WordPress.com. For coders: GitHub Pages, Netlify.
- See the full category for more info.
To design your website, use Bootstrap. If you just have a domain and want free email hosting, use Zoho Mail.
Free WordPress themes: search for free themes inside the WordPress dashboard or pick between OceanWP or Beans.
Free WordPress plugins:
- WPforms lite: free form builder. We use it to collect feedback. you can see it in action here.
- Jetpack: free analytics in the WordPress Dashboard.
- Free plugins we install on every site: WP Super Cache, Loginizer.
- Atomic Blocks: free pre-built blocks in the WordPress editor. You can see an example of the “call-to-action” block at the bottom of this page for our email newsletter signup and the sharing icons at the top of this page.
Free Saas Hosting & Storage: Amazon free tier or Heroku.
Personal Storage: Box (10 GB free) or Google Drive (15 GB free)
Free E-Commerce Options: Square Online Store or BigCartel or WooCommerce (for WordPress). All of them are free in the monthly sense, but you pay per transaction for Square and BigCartel, so you only pay when you sell.
- See full e-commerce list for more options.
Graphics:
- Free Photo Editors: Canva.com or Pixlr.
- Free Logo Generation: Namecheap Logomaker.
- Infographic Creation: Canva.com
Free Email Marketing: AWeber, Sendinblue or Mailchimp.
- See full email marketing category.
Free CRM Options: Agile CRM, Zoho CRM, or Hubspot.
- See full CRM category for more free options.
Free Help Desk Software: Zoho Desk or Freshdesk.
- See full Help Desk Category for more free options.
Free Project Management & Remote Working Apps: Zoho, Basecamp, Notion or Taskade. For software developers: Jira.
- See full list with lots of free options.
Productivity & to-do apps: Todoist, Remember the Milk, & Evernote
- See full list with lots of free options.
Office Software (writing, spreadsheets, etc): Google Apps or Zoho Office
Free Accounting Software: Wave:
Password Manager: LastPass Free
Top Categories on the Startup Groundwork Website
Check out other posts from the No-Nonsense blog
- Email Marketing Vendor AWeber Launches a Free Plan
- How to Calculate the Cost of Hiring a New Employee
- How to Use a Payroll Service Provider to Take the Fear out of Hiring Your First Employee
- A Roundup of the Current Top Website Creation Tools and Fast Prototyping Page Builders
- Square Updates Pricing Plans on Square for Restaurants and Square for Retail
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Revenue Disclosure: We’re upfront people, so we want to be upfront with how we make money. We make money through affiliate links and ads. How do we NOT earn money? We DON’T get paid to add companies to our categories or sell email addresses. That means no one can pay us to put them on the list in any category, move them higher up the list, or change what we say about them. We want small businesses and entrepreneurs to trust us to point them in the right direction, and we’re proud of the fact that this is a guarantee you won’t see on other websites.