Get one weekly email with the best picks for smarter work. We test countless tools so you don’t have to.
Share
🧰 Start Marketing Without Paying Yet
Published about 16 hours ago • 4 min read
🧰 Smart tools. Useful tips. Weekly.
Hola friend 👋,
I’m Josep. Each week, I hunt down practical tools and productivity hacks to help digital doers like you do more with less effort.
This week: free marketing tools that are actually useful.
Free plans can be annoying. Some look generous until you realise the useful feature is locked away, the limits are tiny, or the whole thing is basically a trial with better branding.
So I picked three tools where the free angle still feels practical: one for email marketing, one for quick AI-assisted design, and one for SEO rank tracking. They all have limits, of course. But they can still help you get moving before adding another monthly subscription.
Plus: Snagit for clearer screenshots, a simple Google Drive eSignature trick, and a plot twist about why Google Search is changing under our feet.
Know someone who’d love this newsletter? More than 6,500 readers already do (thanks 🙌). Share it with friends & colleagues so they can join too. Join for free here.
MailerLite brings several marketing essentials together in one place. It gives freelancers and small businesses a convenient way to get online without separately setting up an email marketing platform, website builder, store, and online booking system.
On the free plan, you can build a small website and one landing page, collect subscribers with forms, send email campaigns, and create automations. You can also offer one paid or free booking service, or sell one digital download. That makes it especially useful for consultants, small service companies, or freelancers with limited marketing budgets (and time).
Be aware, once you pass 250 subscribers, send more than 2,500 emails a month, or run 4+ active automations, you'll need to switch to a paid plan. But if you’re just starting out, MailerLite’s free plan gives you plenty of room to build and grow your online presence.
🛠️ Alternative to: Mailchimp, Brevo, ConvertKit, Sender
Microsoft Designer feels like a good fit for anyone who wants Canva-style design help without immediately paying for Canva (yes, Canva also has a generous free plan, but it’s kind of limited).
I find Microsoft Designer especially useful for quick AI visuals: social posts, image ideas, simple banners, invitation-style graphics, and quick design drafts. You describe what you want, pick a direction, and then tweak from there.
I would still say Canva feels stronger if you care about templates, brand kits, polished layouts, and the huge design ecosystem around it. Designer feels lighter and less complete, but also less intimidating to use than Canva.
🛠️ Alternative to: Canva, Adobe Express, VistaCreate
Free SEO tools are usually not very generous. Either the data is too limited, the trial ends quickly, or you only get a tiny taste of the real product. And most SEO tools have one thing in common: they are expensive, even to start with – e.g. Ahrefs starts at $108 a month.
That is why SEOTesting’s Rank Tracker is interesting. It uses your own Google Search Console data and lets you track up to 500 keywords for free. This is not the same as a full paid rank tracker with every possible competitor metric (e.g. Semrush, Ahrefs, Accuranker, etc), but for many small sites, it answers the question that matters first: “Are the keywords I care about moving up or down?”
If you already use Search Console but rarely check it properly, this could be a very practical bridge between raw SEO data and a simple tracking habit.
🛠️ Alternative to: SE Ranking, AccuRanker, Semrush rank tracking
Snagit is not a free marketing tool, so I am keeping it in the off-topic corner. But it fits the kind of work many of us do every week: explaining things visually.
Instead of sending a long “click here, then there, then look at the top-right corner” message, you can capture a screenshot, add arrows, highlight an area, or record a quick screen video.
That is useful for client feedback, support replies, internal usage, bug reports, onboarding notes, and quick tutorials. As I mentioned, it is a paid tool (but fairly affordable), so I would compare it with cheaper or built-in screenshot options first. But if screenshots are part of your daily work, it’s worth testing it out.
🛠️ Alternative to: macOS screenshots, Loom screenshots, CleanShot X, Zight 👉 Visit:techsmith.com 💰 From about $3.25/month | No free plan available
⚡This Week’s Productivity Hack
If you only send a proposal or contract now and then, adding a dedicated eSignature platform can feel like too much tool for a small job.
A simpler option is to check whether you already have eSignature inside Google Workspace. Google’s own eSignature resourcecan be used to request signatures from Google Docs and PDFs.
The hack is not “never use DocuSign” or “replace your legal workflow with Google Drive.” The hack is to start with the smallest tool that solves the problem.
For freelancers and small teams, that might mean using Google eSignature for simple proposals, quotes, approval letters, or low-risk client agreements. You keep the document close to the files you already use, send it for signature, and avoid creating another paid account before you actually need one / can afford it.
🍿 Plot Twist of the Week
Free AI image tools are getting very good, very fast. But the newest twist is not only what they can create. It is also what they are allowed to use.
Meta launched Muse Image, a free AI image generator inside the Meta AI app, Instagram Stories, and WhatsApp. According to TechCrunch, users quickly pushed back because one feature could let people use another public Instagram user’s photos to create AI images.
That raises a bigger question for any company using AI to produce campaigns, visuals, or social content: if your business relies on these tools to generate media, what happens when the underlying privacy or copyright practices are challenged? And could you get in legal trouble for those?
Next week, I’ll keep looking for practical tools that help you teach online.
🧰 Smart tools. Useful tips. Weekly. Hola friend 👋, I’m Josep. Each week, I hunt down practical tools and productivity hacks to help digital doers like you do more with less effort. This week: a beginner-friendly look at advanced AI for marketing, without the developer jargon. For a long time, using AI for marketing meant asking ChatGPT for headline ideas, blog outlines, or a slightly less boring email. Useful, yes. But the newer wave is different: AI can now work inside projects, reuse...
🧰 Smart tools. Useful tips. Weekly. Hola friend 👋, I’m Josep. Each week, I hunt down practical tools and productivity hacks to help digital doers like you do more with less effort. This week: apps to run most of your business online. Businesses do not usually need 40 tools to run. They need a way to be found, take bookings, get paid, and notice when something breaks. So today's stack is about covering that flow without building an enterprise software labyrinth. Plus: a monitoring tool, a mini...
🧰 Smart tools. Useful tips. Weekly. Hola friend 👋, I’m Josep. Each week, I hunt down practical tools and productivity hacks to help digital doers like you do more with less effort. This week: work planning that doesn't become more work. Planning tools are supposed to give the day some shape. But if you spend half the morning tagging tasks, moving blocks, updating statuses, and deciding which view looks nicest, the tool has become another project eating time from the work itself. So this week,...