How to spend nothing on technology for your business

NetSuite Pricing

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. It was the NetSuite pricing that pushed me over the edge one afternoon and drove me to look for a better deal for 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. So here is a skill they won't teach you at business school. In fact I would be suprised if many experienced business owners know what I am about to share with you.

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

• Only spend 8 to 10 minutes per day searching for software tools that cost nothing.
• Go to www.evernote.com and sign up to this free "memory" service.
• Give yourself just ten minutes each day to evaluate what you have found.

Spend just one month on this task and at the end you will have the free software you need and loads of ideas on how you can make your business more cost efficient. To help you get started and prove my point here is a list of tools I use regularly.

If you are about to purchase any of the basic software you need for your business, the chances are you have looked at the software I have listed on the right hand side of the page, on the left you will find their free equivalents.

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…