How I Cut My Business Software Costs in Half Using Free Tools Nobody Talks About in 2026

Paying $800 a month for software that mostly sits open in a browser tab you never click is a specific kind of financial stupidity that snuck up on me slowly, and then all at once.

I run a small consultancy out of Wellington. Nothing glamorous — project management, some content strategy work, a bit of light bookkeeping for clients who’d rather pay me than learn Xero. At some point I’d accumulated subscriptions like a person accumulates loyalty cards: one at a time, each one making sense in isolation, none of them interrogated as a group. By late 2025 my monthly software spend had quietly hit NZD $847. That number, when I finally wrote it down, looked like a typo.

So I spent about three weeks in January 2026 actually auditing what I was paying for, what I was using, and what was genuinely replaceable without tanking my output. What I found was embarrassing, honestly. Not because I’m careless — I’m not — but because the SaaS industry is extremely good at making $29/month feel like nothing until you’ve got eleven of them.

The audit nobody wants to do but everyone should

The first thing I did was pull every transaction from my business Kiwibank account going back twelve months and filter for recurring charges. Not a fun afternoon. But the picture it gave me was clear: I was paying for Notion (fine), Slack (underused), a project management tool I’d switched away from eight months ago but never cancelled, two separate grammar tools, and a video editing platform I’d signed up for during a very optimistic phase of my business development.

The cancelled-but-still-billing subscription alone was NZD $43/month. Sixteen months. You do that maths.

Once I had the full list, I rated each tool on two things: how often I actually opened it in the last 30 days, and whether a free alternative existed that could do 80% of what it did. That 80% threshold matters. I’m not interested in saving $30 and spending three hours per week making peace with a worse interface. But if a free tool does the core job and the paid features are genuinely optional? That’s the conversation.

What I actually replaced, and with what

The project management stack was the biggest win. I’d been using a mid-tier plan on a well-known platform — NZD $78/month for my team of three. Switched to Linear’s free tier for internal tracking and Trello’s free plan for client-facing boards. That’s NZD $78 back per month, and the clients haven’t noticed any difference because they barely logged into the old system anyway.

For document collaboration, I’d been on a Google Workspace Business Starter plan partly out of habit and partly because I’d convinced myself the extra storage was essential. Turns out it wasn’t. I moved back to a free Google account, cleaned out seven years of accumulated files I’ll never open again, and the storage freed itself. The business email routing I handled through Zoho Mail’s free tier — works fine, looks professional, costs nothing.

The grammar tools were the most embarrassing redundancy. I was paying for both Grammarly Premium and a separate AI writing assistant that had significant overlap with it. Grammarly’s free version handles most real-world editing needs unless you’re writing high-stakes legal copy. The AI assistant I replaced with a mix of free Claude usage and the surprisingly good built-in suggestions in Google Docs. Net saving: NZD $54/month, combined.

The tools nobody seems to mention

Here’s where it gets genuinely interesting. There’s a layer of free software that doesn’t get much press because it doesn’t have a growth team pushing it into every LinkedIn post and newsletter.

Tally for forms is one. I was paying for Typeform’s basic plan — NZD $39/month — to handle client intake forms and the occasional survey. Tally does essentially the same thing, looks clean, and is free for unlimited forms and responses. The only thing I miss from Typeform is the conversational one-question-at-a-time format, which my clients never mentioned loving anyway.

For invoicing, I’d been on a paid tier of a popular platform. Switched to Wave, which is genuinely free for invoicing and accounting basics. It’s not as polished as Xero, and if you’re dealing with complex GST scenarios or have a bookkeeper who expects a specific format, you might find the edges rougher than you’d like. But for straightforward invoicing to NZ clients? It handles it. The maths isn’t always this clean for everyone, but for my use case it was.

Canva’s free tier is obvious and everyone knows it, so I’ll skip the sales pitch. Less obvious: Penpot, which is a free, open-source design and prototyping tool that’s become genuinely viable for UI wireframing. I used to pay for a Figma seat at NZD $22/month. Penpot won’t replace Figma for a serious product design team, but for a one-person operation doing the occasional client presentation mock-up? It’s fine. Actually more than fine.

If you’re looking to discover more tools in this space — and some of them do come with trial offers and Exclusive Bonuses worth checking before you commit to a paid plan — it’s worth building a habit of researching the free tier before you ever hit the checkout page.

The honest trade-offs

I’m not going to pretend this is all seamless. There are real costs to switching, and they’re not always measured in dollars.

The biggest one is time. Migrating data, learning new interfaces, rebuilding templates — that’s hours I spent in January that I wasn’t billing for. If your hourly rate is NZD $150 and you spend 20 hours switching tools to save NZD $200/month, the payback period is longer than it looks on paper. For me the long-term savings justified it. For someone else, maybe not.

Support is the other one. Free tools often mean community forums instead of live chat, and documentation that assumes you already know what you’re doing. I got stuck twice with Wave and found my answers on Reddit rather than from a support agent. That’s fine if you’re comfortable with that kind of friction. Less fine if you’re in the middle of a deadline and need someone to pick up the phone.

There’s also the question of data security and longevity. Free tools built by small teams can disappear. Penpot is backed by an open-source community which gives it some resilience. Others are more precarious. I keep exports and backups of anything client-related as a habit — not because I’m paranoid, but because I’ve been burned before.

What I kept paying for, and why

I didn’t cut everything. That would be a different kind of mistake.

I kept my Notion paid plan because I use it daily for everything from meeting notes to client wikis, and the features I was paying for — synced databases, better permissions — actually matter to how I work. I kept a paid Zoom plan because free Zoom’s 40-minute meeting limit is genuinely disruptive when you’re mid-conversation with a client. And I kept a password manager subscription because that one falls into the category of “costs NZD $5/month and the alternative is chaos.”

The rule I landed on: if removing a tool would visibly affect client experience or create meaningful security risk, it stays. Everything else is a candidate. That’s a much cleaner decision framework than trying to evaluate each subscription emotionally in the moment — which is how I ended up with two grammar tools in the first place.

Where I landed after three months

My current monthly software spend sits at NZD $392. Down from NZD $847. That’s NZD $455/month saved, or NZD $5,460 over a year — which, for a small Wellington consultancy, is a meaningful number. That’s a flight to Queenstown, a decent chunk of professional development budget, or simply proof that I’m running a leaner operation than I was twelve months ago.

The quality of my work hasn’t dropped. My clients haven’t noticed any change in deliverables. The main difference is I spend slightly less time with slick software interfaces and slightly more time on actual work, which is — and I realise this is an anticlimactic conclusion — what I should have been doing all along.

The SaaS industry is built on the assumption that you won’t audit yourself. Turns out, once a year, it’s worth proving them wrong.