Cutting your software costs

I want to help you save money and I am never going to ask you for anything in return.

Every year I save thousands of pounds by not spending any money on software. My experience with NetSuite pricing inspired me to set my self the task of finding low cost systems to run my business. I am now confident that I can reliably do most of things I need to do in my business on using software that costs zero dollars. This is not normally included in the business curriculm at colleges. The tragedy is that just about 90% of small business owners don’t know the facts about the amount of free tools out there.

You need to do three things to make this strategy work for you.

• Spend ten minutes max per day searching for free tools.
• Capture the detail of everything you find (and your experiences) on Evernote.com ($0).
• 10 minutes each day evaluating your findings.

I would do this exercise for about one month to get a list together and implement all of the software you nedd. OK, fast start for you a small selection of the tools I use everyday that work well and you should take a look at.

Below in the right hand column you will find the software that you probably have purchased or recognize and on the left you will find the software that will not cost you a thing.

Here we go:

Just type the name of the free product to the search engines

One system to manage customers and accounting

salesorder.com pricing: free NetSuite pricing – really expensive

Sorry I couldnt resist this one…

Creating and writing Documents

Google Docs pricing: $0 Microsoft Office pricing – at least $100

Or

OpenOffice (www.openoffice.org)

Sharing ideas online

Bubbl.us pricing: $0 Mindjet pricing – at least $200

Making videos

Jing pricing: $0 Camtasia Studio pricing – at least $300

Teleseminars

DimDim pricing: $0 AdobeConnect pricing – at least $200/month

My thanks to the NetSuite pricing incident for the inspiration to write this up and help you out.

I will be publishing a long list here in the near future…