Discover 10 free business tools that we personally love and will help you move your business forwards.

Running a business can be such a minefield, finding and deciding on the right small business tools and packages to use can be overwhelming, and that’s before even thinking about spending a penny!

With that in mind, here’s 10 free small business tools that we recommend (contains affiliate links) – some are great if you’re starting out in business, but some will stand the test of your business growing and developing. We still use all of these 11 years in!

1. Canva

It’s pretty well known now, but Canva is a fab free tool for creating graphics in any size for your social account, website and more. There’s so many templates in there for you to get started really easily. The free version has limitations compared to the paid version but still possible to do quite a lot.

2. Chat GPT

If you’re not already, have this app (available on mobile only at the moment) in your favourites for sure! Chat GPT does SO much. If you’re stuck for posts, want ideas, want someone to brainstorm with this is AMAZING. There’s so many places now offering amazing prompt ideas, type into google ‘best chat GPT prompts for small businesses’ and you’ll get loads. Here’s one we found which has so many ideas. Chat GPT is free up to a certain number of requests.

3. Answerthepublic.com

Answerthepublic.com is a really useful tool for discovering the best keywords to use in your product listings, posts, and blog content to help them show at the top of people’s search. You get 3 free searches a day. Type in your topic for example say you sell skincare, and out pops so much data all around the most entered that people type into google about skincare. Use these phrases in your online content and your brand will more likely appear at the top. Upgrade your account to discover so much information to help you with google ads and more.

4. Free photos

If you’re in need of stock photos for your website, check out Unsplash or Pexels where you can download their free imagery to use. It’s great to tag the photographer too, but not essential, just a nice thing to do to help them get recognition too!

5. Jotform

If you want to ask questions to your customers, Jot Form allows you to embed forms into your blog posts, webpages and other content very easily. They offer up to 5 forms on the free plan. It’s great to find out quick feedback, without the need to direct customers away from pages to fill in a form. Embed a one question form onto one of your webpages for example ‘what flavour would you like to see next?’ and you’ve got a live feed of real-time new product ideas your customers want to see – get them to add their email address and you could send them a discount code to thank them for their ideas!

6. Ticket booking tools for events

In 2023 Eventbrite changed their pricing structure. They used to offer a fabulous free ticket booking feature for free events. It was a natural marketing tool to help increase awareness of our own markets and events. However this changed and they now offer free events for up to 25 ticketed people. We switched to Ticket Tailor to manage any event ticketing needs which is a free tool and very easy to use. That said, it doesnt offer the marketing Eventbrite does. So a way round it, if we organise a free event open to the public but want to increase awareness, we always add it on Eventbrite, for up to 25 people. to help increase awareness of our events and workshops.

7. Beacons

If you want a powerful ‘link in bio’ on your social media account, Beacons is an incredible tool that will easily direct your followers to the right place. There’s nothing worse when you see a post on instagram, and you can’t find a link to the specific thing that the post was about. This will help solve that problem for your followers! Include a simple signup for people to become subscribers, add buttons with graphics to certain posts. They also offer many other tools. Do go check them out.

8. Starling

One of the few banks that offers a free business account. Use our referral link here and get a free day pass to one of the hundreds of places the National Trust looks after after you sign up!

9. Tailwind

Tailwind is a fabulous site that helps you automatically post pins on Pinterest, and also offers a fabulous AI tool to create captions, emails and posts for you. You get a number of credits free each month on the free plan, with the option to upgrade to more. Use our referral link and get 50 free credits! It takes a little while to setup, but once live you can keep this running and bring in a regular flow of new traffic to your website through Pinterest

10. Placeit

If you sell clothing, art, mugs and a few other products Placeit is for you! Upload your design and they will put it onto stock imagery to give you lots of lifestyle shots of your product. They offer a free trial which if you make the most of you can download so many pics. Head to ‘mock-ups’ in the menu to get started!

Do you use any of these free small business tools already or have any that you recommend? Let us know in the comments below!