Free Services to get your mobile/ web project started

Most small tech entrepreneurs struggle with different costs related to putting out an online product. However there are plenty of services out there which can be utilised as you are starting up. Some tools can even be used long term as well.

Trying to outlines most of the free stuff I’ve utilised to get projects started and during POC. Information on how to use these can be easily found on the web.

1. AWS: AWS free tier runs for one year. Plenty of time to start earning from your solution. I have deployed over dozens of web applications in AWS Free tier VMs & RDS for different clients. Apart from VM they have many other products with free usage up to one year such as RDS (database as a service). Consider these when you are designing your solution technically. Google Cloud and Azure also comes with a fairly good free tier. Better to explore this as well.
2. Google Firebase: Firebase also has a very attractive free tier. It’s a usage bound modal. Unless you grow beyond a point you can use it for free. Firebase offers hosting, real-time offline database, push notifications, analytics, a-b testing and many more under their free tier. Highly recommend for mobile apps
3. Google API: Most of google apis comes with a fairly large free usage tier. There are ton of api services including famous location & maps apis. Refer https://developers.google.com/apis-explorer
4. OneSignal: Free push notification service with fairly good admin interface. Under free plan you get unlimited mobile app push notifications and 60k web push notifications.
5. Adobe XD: I found this extremely useful when designing UI/UX. As it can link UIs and let you experience clicks and page transitions (easy to setup) its a very useful tool to have. Usually I ask my designer to use it to do the UI design (even when I’m outsourcing). There are other similar solutions out there.
6. Trello: Trello is a card based board to organise tasks. I use it to document, break things into tasks, track developments, report bugs. Even the free version is highly customisable. If you are dealing with a third party developer, better use this instead of simple excel sheets to track progress.
7. Bitbucket/ Github: To manage your source code efficiently. If you are a developer, source code management is a must. Git is the undoubted winner for source code management at the moment.
8. Azure DevOps: If you have a in house devs, this is a great toolkit. Which comes with unlimited free repos, simple boards for task organising, 20,000 free build minutes (CI/CD). Don’t ignore CI/CD as it can save lots of developer hours going into builds. Also it’s great to have frequent builds to see how things are progressing