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You are probably used to read news about startup raising million of dollars in founding, being acquired for billions, or filing astronomical IPOs.
It’s great to read those success stories, but before reaching it, everyone has to start from zero.
And with zero money, it’s very hard to build something.
Or isn’t it ?
Luckily we live in an era where almost every service has a free tier, it comes with compromises, but I heard life is full of them.
If you work for a broken startup (like me), money is not the only important thing, time is equally valuable.
In the past year at YeahNah, we tried to avoid unnecessary expenses while trying to implement the best possible services to achieve our goals and make our life easier.
Here is a list of what services we tried and what are our impressions about them, hoping to save you some time and money.
SOURCE CONTROL
We opted for Bitbucket for a couple of reasons: speed (GitLab is slower from New Zealand), and integration with other services.
Being a small team (less than 5 devs), it’s not a problem for us, but if your team is bigger, GitLab is free for unlimited developers in your team.
They are both really good products so I believe it just comes down to personal needs.
CONTINOUS INTEGRATION
We use BuddyBuild since its early stages and we couldn’t be more happy.
The free version is only limited to 1 concurrent build: when you don’t have money to spare, it’s more than enough.
You can optimize your settings so that only the most important builds will be built (we don’t build all PR and branches) quickly enough.
It also includes crash reporting and many other great features.
If your project is small, you might consider BitRise, the free version gives you 10 minutes of build time.
Honestly I would not really recommend it, if you plan to expand the project, you might hit those 10 mins very quickly.
ANALYTICS
There are an incredible number of analytics tools, most of them offer a free tier, the above list only includes the ones we tried.
We decided to use a mix of Flurry, Mixpanel and UXCam.
Flurry:
It’s completely free and the new interface is really nice, it includes all the basic metrics you might need so I would recommend you to give it a try.
Mixpanel:
It’s a really great service, you can only track up to 1000 users and 20M data point with the free version, and the data retention is only 2 months.
For us it’s enough for the moment, the users tracking feature is great, sadly it’s really expensive and you cannot buy it alone, you need to buy it as an add on to the normal plan… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I guess we will stick with the free version for a long time!
UXCam:
It limits the video uploaded and data points, but for our case it’s more than enough.
It is also quite a new service and it has some bugs and limitation, at the current state the free version is great but the next tier (250$ month) it’s not worth in my opinion.
Firebase:
The analytics part of firebase is completely free although it’s not comparable to Flurry or Mixpanel.
The initial setup is much more complicated, especially if you have different targets in your workspace, it can become annoying.
The events / metrics are delayed up to 24 hours and very limited compared to Flurry.
HockeyApp:
It’s more a crash report than an analytic framework, it support basic analytics but not enough for what we need.
You can add 2 apps for free.
PROJECT MANAGEMENT / SPRINT PLANNING
Trello:
Everybody knows Trello.
We started with it and we quickly tried to find an alternative: too limited.
It’s a great product, but sadly not what we needed. We would end up creating an incredible number of boards with no connection between them and lose cards.
Nostromo:
After Trello we were glad to have found Nostromo, a free (at the time) service which included all the Trello features but better organized.
Having a Project where you have only 2 boards, Plan and Work made things much more clear and we could create different projects for iOS, Backend, and Web App.
It also includes a good time tracking feature and a brilliant Design section where you can comment on designs and attach them to cards.
Sadly it’s not free anymore and it has few bugs, it’s slow and it doesn’t offer any mobile app.
MeisterTask:
We then moved to MeisterTask and this is what we are using at the moment, it’s probably the best free service for Sprint planning and project managing.
It offers mobile apps and an incredible amount of features, combined with a really gorgeous interface.
The free version is limited by the number of integrations you can use, they are great and we would really love to be able to pay for it, but for now, the free version is good enough for us.
TEAM DECISIONS
We built an app for that! And it’s free for everybody.
OTHER REALLY GOOD FREE SERVICES
- Pusher:
Real time socket communications, it’s fast and reliable.
The free version allows up to 100 simultaneous connections and 200k message per day. I can’t recommend it enough. - Meldium:
Great for managing password, free up to 5 users - Branch:
Probably the best deep linking service out there, completely free for basic linking and with an incredible amout of features.
I really recommend to add it to your app. - Slack:
No description necessary. - Zoho Email:
Zoho offers a free email with your custom domain for up to 25 members.
The paid version offers you more storage and documents, but 1gb of data is more than enough for a small startup. - Google docs:
Great for documents, nothing honestly can beat it. - GDrive / Dropbox:
Sharing file, everybody knows them. - Invision
Great for mock ups and prototypes, the free version only allow you to have 1 prototype but sometimes it’s all you need! - Marvel
Another prototyping tool, the free version offers you 2 projects, but no comments and other important features.
There are many others great services I didn’t mention that offer a free tier, I only mentioned the ones we tried.
I’m sure someday we will be able to afford the non-free version of these services and I will be happy to write a new article about that!
Good luck with your startup project, whatever it is!