The Free Startup Tech Stack - Every Tool You Need for $0

Website and Landing Pages

Vercel + Next.js (Free tier) - If you've got a developer on the team, this is the gold standard. Fast, modern, and the free tier is generous enough for most early-stage startups. This very site runs on it.

Carrd ($0-$19/year) - If you don't code, Carrd lets you build a clean one-page website in an afternoon. It's not fancy, but it's fast and it works. Perfect for a landing page to test demand before building anything.

Why these picks: You don't need a custom website on day one. You need a page that explains what you're building and captures email addresses. That's it. Don't spend three weeks perfecting your website when you should be talking to customers.

Email and Communication

Gmail / Google Workspace - Start with a free Gmail account. When you're ready for a custom domain email (you@yourcompany.com), Google Workspace is affordable but you honestly don't need it until you're sending external emails to customers.

Mailchimp (Free tier) - Up to 500 subscribers on the free plan. That's more than enough to get your first newsletter or product update email out the door.

Slack (Free) - For internal team communication. The free tier limits message history, but early on that doesn't matter. You're not going to need to search through messages from six months ago when you're three months old.

Discord - An alternative to Slack, especially if you're building a community alongside your product. Free and surprisingly powerful.

Why these picks: Communication tools should be invisible. They should just work without you thinking about them. All of these do exactly that.

Design

Canva (Free) - For everything from social media graphics to pitch decks to one-pagers. I've seen founders create genuinely impressive investor decks in Canva. You don't need a designer for 90% of early-stage design work.

Figma (Free) - For product design, wireframing, and prototyping. The free tier gives you three projects, which is plenty when you're building one product. Figma is what most professional designers use, so you're learning the industry standard.

Why these picks: Early on, "good enough" design beats "perfect" design every time. Canva gets you to good enough in minutes. Figma is there when you need something more polished.

Project Management

Notion (Free) - The Swiss Army knife of startup tools. Notes, docs, project boards, databases, wikis - it does everything. The free tier is incredibly generous. I've seen entire companies run their operations on free Notion.

Linear (Free for small teams) - If you want something more focused on product development and issue tracking, Linear is beautiful and fast. The free tier covers small teams perfectly.

Trello - Sometimes you just need a simple kanban board. Trello is the simplest project management tool out there, and the free tier is plenty for a small team.

Why these picks: Pick one and stick with it. The worst thing you can do is spread your work across three tools. Notion if you want flexibility, Linear if you want structure, Trello if you want simplicity.

Analytics

Google Analytics - The obvious choice. Free, comprehensive, and the industry default. Set it up on day one so you have data from the start.

Plausible (Open source / self-hosted) - If you care about privacy and want a simpler alternative to Google Analytics, Plausible is excellent. The self-hosted version is free. The hosted version is paid but affordable.

Why these picks: You need to know who's visiting your site and what they're doing. Don't overcomplicate this. Google Analytics is free and good enough. Add more sophisticated tools later when you have real traffic to analyse.

Payments, Legal, and CRM

Stripe - No monthly fee. You only pay a percentage per transaction. This is the default payment processor for startups worldwide, and for good reason - it works, the developer experience is excellent, and they won't charge you a cent until you start making money.

Y Combinator SAFE Templates - Free standard fundraising documents. If you're raising money from angel investors, you don't need a lawyer to draft a SAFE note. YC's templates are free, widely accepted, and understood by every serious investor.

Stripe Atlas - If you need to incorporate in the US (many Australian startups do for fundraising), Stripe Atlas makes it straightforward. Not free, but worth mentioning because the alternative - hiring a US lawyer - costs 10x more.

HubSpot CRM (Free) - A full customer relationship management tool for zero dollars. Track your leads, manage your pipeline, and keep notes on every customer interaction. The free tier is genuinely generous - you won't outgrow it for a while.

Why these picks: Payments and legal are where founders waste the most money early on. Stripe costs nothing until you earn. YC's SAFE templates cost nothing ever. And HubSpot CRM replaces the spreadsheet most founders use to track customers.

AI Tools

ChatGPT (Free tier) - For brainstorming, writing drafts, research, and a hundred other things. The free tier is good enough for most startup tasks.

Claude - Anthropic's AI assistant. Especially strong for analysis, writing, and coding tasks. The free tier is solid.

Cursor - AI-powered code editor. If you're writing code, Cursor dramatically accelerates development. The free tier gives you enough AI completions to feel the difference.

v0 by Vercel - Generate UI components from text descriptions. Incredible for prototyping interfaces quickly when you don't have a designer.

Why these picks: AI tools are the biggest force multiplier available to founders right now. A solo founder with AI tools can do the work of a small team. Use them for writing, coding, design, research, customer support - everything. This is the single biggest advantage early-stage founders have today compared to five years ago.

The "Don't Pay Until" Rule

Here's my general framework for when to upgrade from free to paid:

Don't pay for tools until you have paying customers. There are very few exceptions to this rule. If a tool has a free tier, use the free tier until it genuinely doesn't meet your needs anymore.

Don't pay for tools that solve problems you don't have yet. You don't need an enterprise CRM with 15 integrations. You need a spreadsheet. You don't need a full marketing automation platform. You need a Mailchimp account and 500 subscribers.

Don't pay for tools you're only using 10% of. If you're paying for a premium plan but only using the basic features, downgrade.

The anti-tool-hoarding mindset: Every tool you add is another thing to manage, another login to remember, another integration to maintain. Fewer tools, used well, beats more tools used poorly. Pick the smallest possible set of tools that lets you talk to customers, build product, and track progress. Everything else is a distraction.

The only tools worth paying for early: your domain name, basic hosting (if you outgrow the free tier), and whatever your core product infrastructure requires. Everything else can wait until you have revenue to justify it.