Your complete business tech stack that costs £0 a month

THIS WEEK: Most small businesses end up with a pile of subscriptions nobody planned. This week is the full picture: a complete tech stack built entirely on free plans, covering email, accounting, customers, marketing, team chat and project management, with the limits of every tool stated plainly so you know when free stops being enough.

At the start of 2025 there were 5.7 million private sector businesses in the UK, and 1.4 million of them, 25%, had employees (Business Population Estimates 2025, gov.uk, published October 2025). Once you have a team, software costs multiply, because most tools charge per person per month.

Free plans can carry a small business a long way, but they come with user caps, contact caps and message caps that matter more once more than one person needs access. Each tool below lists the number of people it covers, because that is usually the first limit a growing team runs into.

Free plans also change without much warning. MailerLite cut its free plan to 250 subscribers in June 2026, and Later removed its free plan altogether this year. Every figure below was checked this month.

Layer One: The Foundation

A Google account covers email, file storage, your diary and video calls through Gmail, Drive, Calendar and Meet. Each account gets 15GB of free storage, shared across that account's Drive, Gmail and Google Photos, so a phone full of holiday snaps can eat into business files. On Meet, free group calls with three or more people stop at 60 minutes and take up to 100 participants, while one-to-one calls can run for up to 24 hours. Link: https://drive.google.com

Slack is where the team talks instead of filling inboxes. The free plan keeps 90 days of message history, allows up to 10 apps, and limits huddles to one-to-one calls. Anything older than 90 days disappears from view, so keep important decisions and files somewhere else, such as Drive. Link: https://slack.com/pricing

Bitwarden stores every password the business owns so that nobody reuses the same one everywhere. A free account gives you unlimited passwords on unlimited devices and two-step login using an authenticator app or a hardware key. A free organisation lets two users share up to two collections. A larger team needs a paid organisation, either Families for up to 6 users or Teams, which is billed per user per month. Link: https://bitwarden.com/pricing/

Layer Two: The Money

FreeAgent through Mettle is the best free accounting route for UK sole traders and small limited companies. Mettle is NatWest's free business account for sole traders and limited companies with up to two owners, although only one owner can access the account. It includes FreeAgent at no extra cost, which Mettle says saves at least £150 a year. The condition is at least one transaction a month from the account. If you stop, or close the account and keep using FreeAgent, the normal fees apply. Business customers of NatWest, Royal Bank of Scotland and Ulster Bank also get FreeAgent free. It handles bank feeds, invoicing, tax estimates, Self Assessment and the quarterly updates that Making Tax Digital for Income Tax requires. I use FreeAgent for my own accounting.

If you are a sole trader or landlord, the Making Tax Digital dates follow the gross income on your tax return. Over £50,000 means you start from April 2026, over £30,000 from April 2027, and over £20,000 from April 2028. Sorting your software before your date arrives is much easier than doing it in the week the first quarterly update is due. Link: https://www.mettle.co.uk

Layer Three: Customers

HubSpot Free CRM keeps track of who your customers are and what was last said to them. The free plan covers 1,000 contacts and 2 users, with 2,000 email sends a month carrying HubSpot branding and one personal meetings link. The 2 user cap is the one to watch. A third person who needs access means upgrading. Link: https://www.hubspot.com/pricing/crm

Google Calendar booking page lets clients pick a slot from your real diary. A personal account gets one booking page, while appointment reminders and payment collection are premium features. That works well if you offer one type of consultation. If you already use HubSpot, its free meetings link does the same job, with one link and HubSpot branding. Link: https://calendar.google.com

EmailOctopus runs your email list. The free plan allows 2,500 subscribers and 10,000 emails a month for a single user, with EmailOctopus branding on your emails, one landing page, one form and 30 days of reports. Link: https://emailoctopus.com/pricing

Layer Four: Getting Found

Google Business Profile controls how your business appears on Google Search and Maps, and it costs nothing. For any business that serves a local area, it is the most valuable free tool on this list. Link: https://business.google.com

Google Search Console and Google Analytics 4 are both free. Search Console shows which searches bring people to your website, and Analytics shows what they do once they arrive. Link: https://search.google.com/search-console Link: https://analytics.google.com

Buffer schedules your social media posts in advance. The free plan is for one user and connects 3 channels, holds 10 scheduled posts per channel (refill them whenever you like), stores 100 ideas and keeps 30 days of analytics. Link: https://buffer.com/pricing

Canva handles your graphics. The free plan allows unlimited designs, thousands of templates, 5GB of storage and one brand kit. Background Remover and Magic Resize sit on Pro, which is $18 a month, and so do SVG and transparent-background exports. Sharing by link is included, while Canva's pricing page lists real-time collaboration and comments on paid plans, so a team that edits designs together will outgrow the free plan quickly. Link: https://www.canva.com

Layer Five: Getting Things Done

Trello is where the work gets organised. The free plan gives you up to 10 boards per Workspace, up to 10 collaborators, unlimited cards and 250 automation runs a month. That is enough for most small teams. I run my own business on the free version. Link: https://trello.com

Claude or ChatGPT does the drafting, summarising and research that used to eat your evenings. Both free plans include web search, and each person on the team needs their own account. ChatGPT's free plan runs on GPT-5.5 Instant with 10 messages every 5 hours, and Claude's free plan runs on Claude Sonnet 5 with roughly 15 to 40 messages in a 5-hour window. The deeper research modes sit on the paid plans of both. Pick one as your default and keep the other for a second opinion. Link: https://claude.ai Link: https://chatgpt.com

The One Thing to Pay For: Your Website

Every tool above has a free plan. Your website should not sit on one. Build it on WordPress and pay a professional to do it properly. WordPress powers 40.7% of all websites as of September 2026 (W3Techs), which means a deep pool of experienced people to build it, fix it and look after it.

Your website is what customers see before they ever speak to you. A cheap build shows up as slow pages, a poor layout on a phone and a site that Google struggles to read, and every one of those costs you enquiries. Everything else on this list is back-office. This is the shop window. Link: https://wordpress.org

Open your last three months of bank statements and highlight every software or app charge. Ask each member of your team which tools they pay for on their own card, because those never show up on the business statement. Next to each one that overlaps with a tool in this issue, write the free option. Switch the easiest one today and leave the rest for a monthly review.

NEED HELP? In over your head? Wearing too many hats already? No idea where to start? I can help you. Alternatively, feel free to WhatsApp me on 07800596333!

Sage Sole Trader and Starling Bank are worth knowing about if you do not bank with the NatWest group. A 2026 guide to free Making Tax Digital software lists a free tier from Sage that needs no particular bank account, and Starling includes Making Tax Digital tools with its free business account. Find them at sage.com and starlingbank.com.

A free plan is a sample. Providers set the limits at the point where a growing business would start paying, and for a small business that point is usually further away than the pricing page makes it look. Count the people who need access before you pick a tool, because user caps are where free plans run out first for a team. Run on free until a limit gets in your way, then pay for that single tool and leave the rest alone. That keeps your software bill in proportion to your business instead of to the number of apps you have signed up for.

Free plans also change, as MailerLite and Later showed this year. Put a reminder in your diary each quarter to check the tools you depend on, starting with the ones that hold your customer data.

Need someone to do this properly rather than doing it yourself? I have been doing this for 17 years. Get in touch. Alternatively, feel free to WhatsApp me on 07800596333!