The $0 Tech Stack That Beats a $500/Month One

I want you to do something right now

Open your bank app. Filter by recurring charges. Scroll through them.

Go on. I'll wait.

If you're a typical small business owner, you're probably looking at somewhere between $300 and $600 a month in software subscriptions. Some you use every day. Some you signed up for in 2022 and haven't thought about since.

That's not a tech problem. That's a slow leak in your budget that nobody ever talks about.

Today we're fixing it.

Here's what I see when I look under the hood of a typical small business.

Three cloud storage services. Dropbox because it was the first one. Google Drive because someone sent a shared doc. OneDrive because Microsoft quietly turned it on when they installed Office. You're paying for one of these and ignoring two of them. Or worse, paying for all three.

A project management tool nobody opens. Usually Monday.com, Asana, or Trello. It was going to transform how the team worked. It didn't. Now it auto-renews every month and the last task in it is from March.

An email marketing platform you use quarterly. Mailchimp at $50–80/month. You sent three campaigns last year. That's $25 a newsletter. A very expensive newsletter.

Adobe Acrobat. To open PDFs. That's it. $20/month to open files that every browser on earth opens for free.

Add it up. It's ugly.

This is your foundation. It covers professional email ([email protected]), Microsoft Teams (replaces Zoom, Slack, and half your internal emails), OneDrive with 1TB storage per user (replaces Dropbox), and web versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

One subscription. Four tools killed. Done.

Canva's free plan does everything a small business needs: social media graphics, presentations, flyers, basic brand assets. The paid plan ($20/month) is only worth it if you're doing serious volume. Start free and see how far you get.

If you're currently paying a designer $150 every time you need a Facebook post, this is where you start fixing that.

Beehiiv is a newsletter platform (it's what we use for this very newsletter). The free plan gives you a clean, professional email you can send to up to 2,500 subscribers at zero cost.

If you're paying Mailchimp $50–80/month and have under 2,500 contacts, you're paying for nothing. Move to Beehiiv, save the money, send better emails.

The free version is genuinely useful for drafting emails, writing product descriptions, summarising long documents, creating social media captions, and brainstorming when you're stuck.

It's not replacing your team. It's replacing the 45 minutes you spend staring at a blank page.

Free. Completely free. Tells you exactly how many people visit your website, where they came from, what they looked at, and how long they stayed.

If you're paying for any website analytics tool, stop. Install Google Analytics and cancel whatever you're currently using.

Notion replaces your project management tool, your shared documents folder, your internal wiki, and your meeting notes. The free plan is enough for teams of up to five people.

If you're paying for Monday.com or Asana and your team has under five people, try Notion free for a month. I'd be surprised if you went back.

That's roughly $2,300 a year back in your pocket. Same functionality. Or better.

Don't overthink it. You can always re-subscribe if you actually miss it.

You won't miss most of them.

If this was useful, forward it to one person who runs a small business. It costs you nothing and might save them a few hundred bucks a month.

Questions? Hit reply. I read every one.

Iain No BS Tech | nobstech.au