A couple of weeks ago someone posted in a Facebook group seeking recommendations for a calendar booking tool. She needed it to have certain features and she wanted it to be free.
I made my recommendation – but it wasn’t free. Chances are, what she was looking for would only be available with a paid tool.
It’s a conversation that comes up all the time: all the tools and platforms you need (or want) in an online business, and the associated costs. If you sign up for all of them, those costs can add up very fast (a mistake I made in the early days of my business).
On the other hand, if you try to do everything for free you’ll spend a lot of time doing things manually, and in some cases, it could undermine the professional feel of your business.
So how do you decide what makes sense to pay for?
Unfortunately I’m not here with a handy list of must-have subscriptions. That will look different for each business and budget. But what I can share is my own lens for making these decisions, what I pay for, and what’s not worth it.
how i decide
Like I said earlier, there are so many tools you could use to make running your business smoother or easier. At the same time, I know that solo business owners tend to run a really tight ship, either because cashflow’s pretty tight in the early days or because a lean business means more money to re-invest or pay yourself. So we want to be making really smart decisions about where we spend!
When it comes to figuring out what makes sense to pay for, I ask 3 questions:
- Will this save me time?
- Will this make my life easier?
- Will this generate revenue?
Answering yes to any of these questions doesn’t automatically mean I’ll pay for something, but it means I’m making a considered decision either way, rather than defaulting to free or defaulting to paid without thinking it through.
For example, I do my own bookkeeping. Paying someone else to do that would save me time, and maybe make my life easier. But right now, my bookkeeping is pretty straightforward and doing it myself keeps me really connected to my numbers. Plus, I only occasionally create an interesting tangle for my accountant to unravel 👀
what i pay for
I won’t give you the whole list, but here’s some of what I choose to pay for in my business, and why.
Xero. Every time they put their prices up, business groups are flooded with people looking for alternatives, but it saves me so much time in reconciling and generating useful reports that it’s well worth the investment for me.
Canva. I’ve been using Canva since the very early days when it gave you something like 8 shapes and 20 fonts to play with, and it has come so far since then. Background remover was one of the first premium tools they introduced that I absolutely frothed over, and they continue to improve and impress. Brand kit, stock photos, document re-sizer… the time-saving premium features pay for themselves over and over.
Loom. Most often, the easiest way to explain something is “let me walk you through it” so a screen recorder like Loom quickly becomes essential. I can open something up, hit record and talk through the thing, then quickly and easily share the video with a link. The free plan limits both the number of videos you can keep and their length, so I upgraded to a paid version – but given they recently put their prices up quite a bit I’m currently testing ScreenPal and will likely switch soon.
what i don’t pay for
There’s still quite a few tools I use daily that I don’t pay for, either because the paid features aren’t quite worth it, or I’ve figured out a manual workaround that isn’t too painful. For example:
Asana. I use this for task management in my own business and with several clients. I’m in there all the time. Even so, there’s only 2 paid features I’d use so it’s not worth upgrading. The main one is workflow automations, and to get around that, I create workflow templates that I then duplicate when I want to use them. It takes a few minutes, but it also keeps me connected to the task and dates. (The other one is start and due dates – nice to have, but not need to have).
Mailerlite. I use this for my mailing list, and their free plan has all the features I need for now (and it’s much better than Mailchimp’s free plan). When it makes sense, I’ll definitely be upgrading to a paid plan because it’s a great platform, but I don’t need it yet.
Fathom. This is an AI notetaker that joins my calls and transcribes them. You’ve probably seen it (or similar tools like Otter) doing the rounds. While I love it, and use it all the time, I’ve got a simple (and quick) manual workaround that covers the paid features I’d be likely to use. You can read about my process for using Fathom + ChatGPT to create SOPs here; my post-call workflow is very similar but I use a prompt to create a summary of the key items + generate a simple list of my tasks.
replacing subscriptions with one-time tools
The final recommendation for keeping costs down is to keep an eye out for tools that have a one-time payment instead of an ongoing subscription. Two of my favourites are:
TidyCal. This has all the features of Calendly or Acuity (and in some cases, more features) and is available via a lifetime license.
UPDF. I’ve been a long time Adobe subscriber but at a certain point it felt like they were taking the piss with their subscription fees, knowing they’ve cornered a market. So I went on the hunt for alternatives and, after testing a few, I settled on UPDF. This has all the features I was using in Acrobat Pro like editing PDFs, adding form fields to a document, and reorganising pages, and is available on a lifetime license. The user interface is different, but their help library has really good how-tos, and once you get the hang of it, it’s very simple to use.
a note about platform switching
Most of these I’ve been using for quite some time, and I know plenty of alternatives have entered the market lately. Zoom, for example, has added a whole bunch of AI features that could replace Fathom – but that’s exactly the kind of switch I’d think carefully about before making.
Finding and properly testing new tools takes time. So while you might be tempted to platform-hop when new or cheaper alternatives turn up, it might not be worth it in the long run for the sake of saving a few dollars a month. My current Loom-to-ScreenPal experiment is a good example: there’s not much of a learning curve and the price increase was significant enough to justify the switching cost.
There’s no universal answer to what’s worth paying for – but there is a better question to ask. Instead of “what’s free?” or “what does everyone else use?”, ask yourself: does this save me time, make my life easier, or help me make money? If the answer is yes and the price is reasonable, it’s probably worth it. If not, the free plan – or a slightly manual workaround – can be just fine.
Want more tailored recommendations to suit your business and budget? Hop on over here.
