So you’re building your startup and you want to invest your money on salaries and marketing. Using SaaS tools are a great way to cut costs, but sadly, nowadays, most tools are not startup or side-projects “friendly”.
Over the past years, I’ve developed a lot of side-projects, from a 3D model search engine to an iOS fitness app and a digital wedding invitation platform. I’ve collected great SaaS tools that I’ve been using for years. Here’s my stack of tools that offer a usable and valuable free plan/tier.
Images / Videos / Icons
Canva + Canva Button
Online photo editor on steroids. All common design sizes and templates are built-in. No more searching for the right Facebook ad image size. They also offer a “Canva Button” which allows you to add the Canva editor to your website forms.
Pexels
The best free stock photo site out there. Period. Think you can challenge this statement? I’ll meet you in the comments section below 🧐
The Noun Project
Icon, Icon, Icons. Every icon you can think of, in PNG or SVG formats. They offer over 20 million icons, with built-in customization colors like size and color. Whaaaatttttt!
Marketing / CRMs
CaptainTweet
Twitter marketing automation with a funny brand and great UI. The initial setup takes a while, but after that, your Twitter account will automatically interact with twitter users that are relevant to your business.
Tribed
Probably one of the best tools I use that cuts me a lot of time in dev & marketing work. It’s a user dashboard where you can see exactly what’s going on with your product and also a Gmail marketing automation tool. All of my projects’ welcome emails, “Come back to us” emails, and user event-based emails are sent from my own Gmail account (I use google aliases) and always reach the inbox of my users.
Tawk.to
Live chat + contact form for your website that’s super fast and has great UI and robust customization options. They also offer automation, so if visitors are on a specific page for a specific duration, you can start a conversation with them automatically.
FreshDesk
Great support CRM, has a lot of integrations, the one I like most is their Twitter integration that allows you to automatically get DMs as tickets. They also offer a mobile app which is a great plus for answering tickets on-the-go.
Google Optimize
Free AB testing platform with an amazing Chrome browser to help you set up AB test of your active site by simply clicking and editing your site and saving that as a variation. Test your landing pages / front page for better conversions without a single line of code.
Domains / Hosting
Namecheap
Cheap domains with free WHOIS guard and a robust DNS editor. They also have coupons active all the time. A short google search will provide a coupon.
DigitalOcean
It probably doesn’t need mentioning, but just in case- In my opinion, the best VPS host out there. It starts at just $5 for a 1 CPU server.
Analytics
HotJar
Great tool for website heatmaps and visitor video recording. They have a lot more robust options but most of those are unusable in the free-tier. I love watching my website visitors scrolling away and reading with their mouse cursor.
Google Analytics
Pretty obvious… I just felt wrong not having it here 🤷♂️
Development
DeployHQ
Great deployment tool with 10 daily deployments on the free tier. It can automatically connect to BitBucket or GitHub and push changes to your servers when you commit and push changes.
MailTrap
An SMTP service that really helps with testing emails going out of your severs. Inspect and debug your emails before you send any of them out.
SendGrid
A robust transactional email system. My local environment is using MailTrap and production uses Sendgrid. Free tier has great quota compared to competitors. After Mailgun started to have mail delivery issues, I switched over to SendGrid. Although, I use Tribed for most of my emails nowadays.
