The read
The $0 Tech Stack
Five tools, zero dollars, one full year in business — plus what each paid alternative would have cost and the moment it becomes worth paying for.
Download the PDFEveryone tells you that you need a $200-a-month stack before you have made a single dollar. You don't.
This is the whole thing — a field guide for year one. What each tool replaces, what the paid version would have cost, where the free tier actually runs out, and the one rule for deciding when to start paying.
- What the stack costs
- $0What the stack costs
- Per month not spent
- $200+Per month not spent
- Kept in year one
- $2,400+Kept in year one
- Over three years
- $7,200+Over three years
1. The five swaps
What I actually use, and what everyone else is paying for instead.
HubSpot CRM Free forever
hubspot.com/products/crm$99.00You would pay / mo
Instead of. Paid CRM seat (Sales Hub Pro)
Calendly Free plan
calendly.com$12.00You would pay / mo
Instead of. Calendly Standard / Acuity
Google Sheets Free
sheets.google.com$50.00You would pay / mo
Instead of. Airtable Team or a dashboard SaaS
The conventional stack: $218.99 a month. Five line items, every month, before your first client. That is over $2,400 in year one — money that comes out of a business that hasn't proven it works yet.
2. Where free stops
Free is not unlimited. Know the ceiling before you hit it at the worst possible moment — mid-launch, mid-invoice, mid-client-call.
Canva
- You get
- Full editor, thousands of templates, unlimited free-library assets, 5 GB storage.
- It stops at
- Brand kit, background remover and most premium stock are Pro-only.
- Pay when
- You are resizing the same asset for four platforms every week.
HubSpot CRM
- You get
- Unlimited users, up to 1,000,000 contacts, pipeline, email tracking, meeting links.
- It stops at
- No sequences or real automation. HubSpot branding on your forms and email.
- Pay when
- You are hand-sending the same follow-up more than about 20 times a month.
Wave
- You get
- Unlimited invoices and estimates, double-entry books, receipt capture.
- It stops at
- Payments and payroll are add-ons, charged per transaction rather than monthly.
- Pay when
- Your accountant needs inventory, job costing or multi-currency.
Calendly
- You get
- One event type, one calendar, unlimited bookings, automatic time-zone handling.
- It stops at
- One event type only. No round-robin, no payments, no removing branding.
- Pay when
- You need two session lengths, or you want payment at the moment of booking.
Google Sheets
- You get
- Everything. Formulas, charts, sharing, version history, Apps Script automation.
- It stops at
- Slows past roughly 100k rows. A personal account means no custom domain.
- Pay when
- Several people edit the same file daily and start overwriting each other.
3. The rule
Buy software when it saves you time you are actually billing for. Not before.
A $50-a-month tool that gives back two hours a month is a bargain at a $75 hourly rate and a waste at $20. That is the entire calculation. Run it before every subscription, and run it again at every renewal — the tool doesn't change, but your rate does, and the answer flips the moment your time gets more valuable than the software.
Get the companion spreadsheet
Drop in what you currently pay and it calculates your own number. Three tabs: the full cost comparison, the free-tier ceilings, and a blank tracker that tells you which of your subscriptions is worth keeping.
The-0-Tech-Stack-Cost-Comparison.xlsx — 3 tabs, no email required.