Free Tools for Entrepreneurs & Tech Startups

February 6, 2015

Attention Tech Startups & Fellow Entrepreneurs:
As a Startupologist There Is Nothing Better Than Finding Free Stuff Made By Awesome People!

Special thanks to all the bloggers and web content curators that spread the word about free tools, tips and tricks for bootstrappers. This list was curated from +50 tech blogs & websites such as AllTop, TNW, Buffer Blog, Product Hunt, Angellist, Pickcrew, Betalist, TechCrunch, etc.

Hope you find something helpful. If so, please share so others can benefit.
If you know of more useful sites, please comment.

Business + Marketing

FREE WEBSITE + LOGO + HOSTING + INVOICING

HTML5 UP: Responsive HTML5 and CSS3 site templates.
Bootswatch: Free themes for Bootstrap.
Templated: A collection of 845 free CSS & HTML5 site templates.
WordPress.org | WordPress.com: Create your new website for free.
Strikingly.com Domain: One free website for strikingly.com domains.
Withoomph: Beautiful logos designed instantly.
Hipster Logo Generator: It’s Hip, It’s Current, It’s Stylish, It’s Hipster.
Squarespace Free Logo: You can download free low-res version for free.
Hive:First free unlimited cloud service in the world.
Invoice to me: Free Invoice Generator.
Free Invoice Generator: Alternative free invoice generator.
Slimvoice: Insanely simple invoices.

FREE BUSINESS / PROJECT NAME GENERATORS

The Name App: Find an available name for your brilliant idea.
Naminum: Discover a perfect company name.
Short Domain Search: Find short, available single-word domain names.
Wordoid: Pick a short and catchy name for your business.
Hipster Business Name: Hipster business name generator.
Impossibility: The best domain name generator ever.
Lean Domain Search: Find a domain name for your website in seconds.

WRITING / BLOGGING

Hemingway: Hemingway App makes your writing bold and clear.
Grammarly: Finds & corrects mistakes of your writing.
ZenPen: The minimal writing tool of web.
Liberio: Simple eBook creation and publishing right from Google Drive.
Editorial Calendar: See all your posts, drag & drop to manage your blog.
Story Wars: Writing stories together.
Headline Analyzer: Emotional marketing value headline analyzer.
WP Hide Post: Control the visibility of items on your blog.
Social Locker: Ask visitors “to pay” for your content with a tweet, etc.
Egg Timer: Set a time and bookmark it for repeated use.

FIND (TRENDING) CONTENT (IDEAS)

Portent: Content idea generator.
Google Trends: A new way of displaying trending searches.
Buzzsumo: Analyze what content performs best for any topic or competitor.
Hubspot Blog Topic Generator: Custom blog ideas.
Swayy: Discover the most engaging content. Free for 1 dashboard user.
Others: Google+ What’s Hot| Twitter Trending | Quora| Reddit

FREE SEO + WEBSITE ANALYZERS

Open Site Explorer: A comprehensive tool for link analysis.
Ahrefs: Site explorer & backlink checker.
Quick Sprout: Complete analysis of your website.
WordPress SEO by Yoast: Have a fully optimized WordPress site.
SEO Site Checkup: Check your website’s SEO problems for free.
Hubsport Marketing Grader: Grade your marketing.
SimilarWeb: Analyze website statistics for any domain.
Alexa Ranking: Analytical insights to analyze any site’s rank.
SERPs Rank Checker: Free keyword rank & SERP checker.
Keywordtool.io: Free alternative to Google Keyword Planner.
Google: Analytics| Keyword Planner| Webmaster Tools| Trends
Nibbler: Test any website.
Browseo: How search engines see your website.
Broken Links: Find broken links, redirects & more.
Copyscape:S earch for copies of your page on the web.
Woorank: Website review and SEO tool.
Google Pagespeed Insights: Check the performance of your site.
Pingdom Website Speed Test: Test & the load time of a site.
GTMetrics: Analyze your page’s speed performance.
Moz Local: Check your local listings on Google, Bing, and others.
XML Sitemaps: Sitemap generator that creates XML & HTML variants.
W3C validator: Easy-to-use markup validation service.
Shopify E-commerce Report:Get your free Ecommerce report.

FREE IMAGE OPTIMIZERS

TinyJPG | TinyPNG Compress images.
Kraken: Optimize your images & accelerate your websites.
ImageOptimizer: Resize, compress and optimize your image files.
ImageOptim: Makes images take up less disk space & load faster.
Smush.it: Image optimizer WordPress plugin.

FREE IMAGE EDITORS

Canva: Amazingly simple graphic design for bloggers.
Skitch: Get your point across with fewer words.
Easel.ly: Empowers anyone to create & share powerful visuals.
Social Image Resizer Tool: Create optimized images for social media.
Placeit: Free product mockups & templates.
Recite: Turn a quote into a visual masterpiece.
Meme Generator: The first online meme generator.

COLLECT & SEND EMAILS FOR FREE

Contact form 7:Famous WordPress plugin to collect email addresses.
Mailchimp: Send 12,000 emails to 2,000 subscribers for free.
ManyContactsBar: Free contact form sits on top of your website.
Hello Bar: Get more email subscribers.
Sumome List Builder: Collect email addresses with light box popover.
Scroll Triggered Box: Boost your conversion rates — WordPress only.
Sumome Scroll Box: Capture more email addresses, politely.

FREE SOCIAL MEDIA + COMMUNITY MANAGEMENT + SURVEYS

WriteRack: The easiest way to blog/tweetstorm on twitter.
Spruce: Make Twitter ready images in seconds.
Click To Tweet: Get more shares on your content.
MyTweetLinks: Increases Twitter traffic.
Latergram: Easily plan & schedule your Instagram posts.
WordPress Pin it Button for Images: Add a “Pin It” button.
SharedCount: Track URL shares, likes, tweets, and more.
Justunfollow: Follow / unfollow people on Twitter & Instagram.
SocialRank: Identify, organize, and manage your followers on Twitter.
Klout: Social media influence score on browser extension.
Ritetag: Instant hashtag analysis.
Social Analytics :Interactions for a URL on most social platforms.
Riffle: Full profile and info on any Twitter user.
Buffer Free Plan: Schedule posts to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+.
Bitly: Create, share, and track shortened links.
Flament: A free beautiful and customizable sharing bar.
Addthis: Get more shares, follows and conversions.
Sumome Share: Auto-optimizes your share buttons for max traffic.
Digg Digg: Your all in one share buttons plugin.
Disqus: Build a community of active readers & commenters.
Typeform: Free beautiful online survey & form builder.
Tally:Create polls in no time.

A/B TESTS & GROWTH HACKING

Petit Hacks: Acquisition, retention, & revenue hacks used by companies.
Optimizely: One optimization platform for websites and mobile apps.
Hello Bar: Tool for A/B testing different CTAs & power words.
GrowthHackers: Unlocking growth. Together.

FREE DESIGN RESOURCES

Design + Code

Freebbble: High-quality design freebies from Dribbble.
Dribbble: Dribbble search results for “freebie”. An absolute freebie treasure.
Graphic Burger: Tasty design resources made with care for each pixel.
Pixel Buddha: Free and premium resources for professional community.
Material Design UI Kit: Based on Google’s new guidelines & baseline grid.
Premium Pixels: Free Stuff for Creative Folk.
Fribbble: Free PSD resources by Dribbblers curated by Gilbert Pellegrom.
Freebiesbug: Latest free PSDs & other resources for designers.
365 Psd: Download a free PSD every day.
Dbf: Dribbble & Behance best design freebies.
Marvel: Free resources from designers we love.
UI Space: High quality hand-crafted Freebies for awesome people.
Free Section of Pixeden: Free design resources.
Free Section of Creative Market: Freebies coming out every Monday.
Teehan+Lax: DiOS 8 GUI PSD (iPhone 6).
Teehan+Lax: I Pad GUI PSD.
Freepik: iFree graphic resources for everyone.
Tech&All: PSD, Tech News, and other resources for free.
Tethr: The most beautiful IOS design KIT ever.

COLOR PICKERS

Material Palette: Generate & export your Material Design color palette.
New Flat UI Color Picker: Best flat colors for UI design.
Flat UI Colors: Beautiful flat colors.
Coolors: Super fast color schemes generator for cool designers.
Skala Color: An extraordinary color picker for designers and developers.
Couleurs: Simple app for grabbing & tweaking colors you see on screen.
Material UI Colors: Material UI color palette for Android, Web & iOS.
Colorful Gradients: Gradients automatically created by a computer.
Adaptive Backgrounds: Extract dominant colors from images.
Brand Colors: Colors used by famous brands.
Paletton: The color scheme designer.
0 to 255: A simple tool that helps web designers find variations of any color.
Colour Lovers: Create & share colors, palettes, and patterns.
Adobe Color CC: Color combinations from the Kuler community.
Bootflat: Perfect colors for flat designs.
Hex Colorrrs: Hex to RGB converter.
Get UI Colors: Get awesome UI colors.
Coleure: Smart color picker.
Colllor: Color palette generator.
Palette for Chrome: Creates a color palette from any image.

INSPIRATION

MaterialUp: Daily material design inspiration.
FLTDSGN: Daily showcase of the best flat UI design websites and apps.
Site Inspire: Web design inspiration.
UI Cloud: The largest user interface design database in the world.
Moodboard: Build a beautiful moodboard and share the result.
Crayon: The most comprehensive collection of marketing designs.
Land-Book: Product landing pages gallery.
Ocean: A community of designers sharing feedback.
Dribbble: Show and tell for designers.
Behance: Showcase & discover creative work.
Pttrns: Mobile user interface patterns.
Flat UI Design: Useful board I discovered thanks to Erik.
Awwwards: The awards for design, creativity and innovation.
The Starter Kit: Curated resources for developers and designers.
One Page Love: Resource for one page website inspiration.
UI Parade: User interface design tools and design inspiration.
The Best Designs: The best of web design.
Agile Designers: Best resources for designers & developers.
Niice: A search engine with taste.

FREE STOCK PHOTOGRAPHY

Stock Up: Best free stock photo websites in one place.
Pexels: Best free photos in one place.
All The Free Stock: Free stock images, icons, and videos.
Unsplash: Free (do whatever you want) high-resolution photos.
Splashbase: Search & discover free, hi res photos & videos.
Startup Stock Photos: Go. Make something.
Jay Mantri: Free pics. do anything (CC0). Make magic.
Moveast: This is a journey of a Portuguese guy moving east.
Travel Coffee Book: Sharing beautiful travel moments.
Designers Pics: Free photographs for your personal & commercial use.
Death to the Stock Photo: Free photos sent to you every month.
Foodie’s Feed: Free food pictures in hi-res.
Mazwai: Free creative commons HD video clips & footages.
Jéshoots: New modern free photos.
Super Famous: Photos by Dutch interaction designer Folkert Gorter.
Picography: Free hi-resolution photos.
Pixabay: Free high quality images.
Magdeleine: A free high-resolution photo every day.
Snapographic: Free stock photos for personal & commercial use.
Little Visuals: 7 hi-res images in your inbox every 7 days.
Splitshire: Delicious free stock photos.
New Old Stock: Vintage photos from the public archives.
Picjumbo: Totally free photos.
Life of Pix: Free high-resolution photos.
Gratisography: Free high-resolution photos.
Getrefe: Free photos.
IM Free: A curated collection of free resources.
Cupcake: A photographer’s treat by Jonas Nilsson Lee.
The Pattern Library: Free patterns for your projects.
Public Domain Archive: New 100% free stock photos.
ISO Republic: High-quality, free photos for creative..
Stokpic: Totally free photos.
Kaboompics: The best way to get free photos.
Function: Free photo packs.
MMT: Free stock photos by Jeffrey Betts.
Paul Jarvis: Free high-resolution photos.
Lock & Stock Photos: Free stock photos for you.
Raumrot: Free high-resolution picture.
Bucketlistly: A free creative common collection of travel photos.
Some more websites: Free Digital Photos |Morguefile | Public Domain Pictures | Stockvault | ImageFree | Rgbstock |Dreamstime | Free Images | Free Range Stock | Free Photos Bank.
Some hand-picked some free photo packs:

FREE TYPOGRAPHY

TypeGenius: Find the perfect font combo for your next project.
Font Squirrel: 100% free commercial fonts.
FontFaceNinja: Browser extension to find the web fonts a site uses.
Google Fonts: Free, open-source fonts optimized for the web.
Beautiful Web Type: Best typefaces from the Google web fonts directory.
DaFont: Archive of freely downloadable fonts.
1001 Free Fonts: A huge selection of free fonts.
FontPark: The web’s largest archive of free fonts.
Font-to-width: Fit pieces of text snugly within their containers.

FREE ICONS

Fontello: Icon fonts generator.
Flat Icon: A search engine for 16000+ glyph vector icons.
Material Design Icons:750 Free open-source glyphs by Google.
Font Awesome:The iconic font and CSS toolkit.
Glyphsearch: Search for icons from other icon databases.
MakeAppIcon: Generate App Icons of all sizes with a click.
Endless Icons: Free flat icons and creative stuff.
Ico Moon: 4000+ free vector icons, icon generator.
The Noun Project: Thousands of glyph icons from different artists.
Perfect Icons: A social icon creation tool.
Material Design Icons: 750 Free open-source glyphs by Google.
Icon Finder: Free icon section of the website.
Free Round Icons: Doodle Set | Flat Set | Vector Line Set
Icon Sweets:60 free vector Photoshop icons.

FREE USEFUL STUFF

UI Names: Generate random names for use in designs and mockups.
UI Faces: Find and generate sample avatars for user interfaces.
UI Blurbs: Quick user bios for your mockups.
Copy Paste Character: Click to copy.
Window Resizer: See how it looks on various screen resolutions.

Work & Productivity

BACKGROUND SOUNDS = HELP YOUR FOCUS

Noisli: Background noise & color generator.
Noizio: Ambient sound equalizer for relax or productivity.
Defonic: Combine the sounds of the world into a melody.
Designers.mx: Curated playlists by designers, for designers.

AVOID DISTRACTION

Self Control: Mac: free application to help you avoid distracting websites.
Cold Turkey: Windows: temporarily block yourself off of distracting websites.

ORGANIZE & COLLABORATE

Trello: Keeps track of everything.
Evernote: The workspace for your life’s work.
Dropbox: Free space up to 2GB.
Wetransfer: Free transfer up to 10GB.
Drp.io: Free, fast, private and easy image and file hosting.
Pocket: View later, put it in Pocket.
Mailtoself: An iOS extension to mail notes to yourself from any app.
List.ly: Discover and create great lists.
Markticle: Mark your reading progress in articles for later.

DIGITAL NOMADS & REMOTE WORKING

Nomadlist: The best cities to live and work remotely.
Where Nomads at: Find digital nomads & travelers all around the world.
Nomad Jobs: The best remote jobs at the best startups.
What’s It Like: Helping travelers figure out WHEN to go.

DISCOVER TOOLS & STARTUPS

Discover & Learn

Product Hunt: Curation of the best new products, every day.
Angellist: Where the world meets startups.
Beta List: Discover and get early access to tomorrow’s startups.
StartupLi.st: Find. Follow. Recommend startups.
Startups List: Collections of the best startups in different places.

BUILD TOGETHER

Assembly: Co-create new ideas no matter where they are.
CoFoundersLab: Find a co-founder in any city, any industry.
Founder2be: Find a co-founder for your startup.

LEARNING

Skillshare: Unlock your creativity with free online classes & projects.
Khan Academy: Free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.
Coursera: Free online classes from 80+ top universities & organizations.
Codeacademy: Learn to code interactively, for free.
How to start a startup: As an Audio Podcast or As Online Course
Startup Notes: Startup School invites amazing founders to tell their story.
The How: Learn from entrepreneurs.
Launch This Year: Guide to help you launch your online business.
Closed Club: Browse shut-down start-ups & learn why they closed down.
Startup Talks: A curated collection of startup related videos.
Rocketship.fm: Learn from successful entrepreneurs each week.
reSRC.io: All free programming learning resources.

NEWSLETTERS THAT DON’T WASTE YOUR TIME

Email1K: A free 30 day course to double your email list.
Design for Hackers: 12 weeks of design learning, right in your inbox.
Startup Digest: Personalized newsletter for all things startup in your area.
Mattermark Daily: Curated newsletter from investors & founders.
ChargeWhatYou’reWorth: Free course on charging what you’re worth.
Product Psychology: Lessons on User Behavior.
UX Newsletter: Tales of researching, designing, and building.
UX Design Weekly: Best user experience design links every week.

USEFUL

Foundrs: Co-founder equity calculator.
Ad Spend Calculator: Should my startup pay to advertise?
HowMuchToMakeAnApp: Calculate the cost of a mobile application.
App vs. Website: Should you build an app or website?

Author

Melissa Fisher

Melissa Fisher is a startupologist who works with companies as an interim CEO, COO or CMO during expansion phase growth. Today she serves as managing partner at Peak Road Partners, an elite network of C-level executives that help companies reach peak performance and profitably by providing interim executive placements and consulting.