Recommended tools — our verified picks

Every tool below is one we have verified pricing on, with the date on the price line. Where we have an approved affiliate partnership, the vendor link is an affiliate link and marked as such; until then it is a plain link. The price never changes either way — that is the deal with our readers, stated in our pricing rule.

CRM & sales

Pipedrive

From €14/seat/mo on annual billing (Lite). No free plan; 14-day trial. Best structured pipeline for a service team — pricing explained · setup guide

Streak

Free plan (no pipelines), Pro from $49/mo. The CRM that lives inside Gmail — pricing explained

HubSpot (read this first)

Starter pricing is geo-served and Professional has no public price — read the breakdown before talking to sales. vs Pipedrive · why prices go missing

Project & work management

ClickUp

Genuinely usable free plan; paid from a low per-seat floor. Best free starting point for a small team — pricing explained · setup guide

monday.com

From $9/seat/mo annual — but a 3-seat minimum and automation quotas that cliff from 250 to 25,000. pricing explained · the automation cliff

Notion

Free for solo use; Plus $10/seat/mo. Best as a client panel under 25 clients — our setup tutorial · vs ClickUp

Email & newsletters

Kit

Free to 10,000 subscribers, unlimited sends — automations need Creator at $33/mo. Best list-first choice — pricing explained · welcome sequence tutorial

MailerLite

$12/mo for 1,000 subscribers with automations included. Best early-years value — vs Mailchimp · vs beehiiv

beehiiv

Free to 2,500; Lite $49/mo up to 100,000 with 0% take rate. Best when the newsletter is the business — pricing explained

Mailchimp (with a warning)

Free tier now 250 contacts, and paid overage bills automatically. Read before building on it — pricing explained · why the line moved

Courses & digital products

systeme.io

Free plan: 2,000 contacts, 3 funnels, and 0% fees on every paid tier. Best for validating a first offer — pricing explained · vs Teachable

Teachable

New lineup: Starter $59/mo with a 7.5% fee; Builder $119 at 0%. Free plan discontinued — pricing explained

Podia

Mover $42/mo with a 5% fee (0% from Shaker $84); email capped at 100–500 subscribers. Best storefront-first — pricing explained · vs Kit

Invoicing & money

Wave

Free invoicing on Starter; card processing 2.9% + $0.60, published openly. Best self-flying retainer invoices — vs FreshBooks · recurring setup

FreshBooks (with a warning)

Lite $23/mo but only 5 billable clients; card rates not published. Read before subscribing — vs Wave · fee arithmetic

Scheduling

Calendly

Free covers one event type; Standard $10/seat/mo annual. The one-type limit decides the upgrade for consultants — pricing explained · consultant setup

Current partnerships

The tools below are ones where our affiliate partnership has been approved. The links in this section are affiliate links — using them costs you nothing; the vendor pays us a commission. None of them has a published pricing breakdown on this site yet, so the cards carry positioning only, no price claims. As we verify each one and write its breakdown, it moves up into its category above.

Keap

CRM plus email marketing built for small service businesses that sell through follow-up sequences. Visit Keap — affiliate link

Brevo

Email, SMS and a lightweight CRM in one platform; the free tier is one of the more usable ones. Visit Brevo — affiliate link

Shore

Booking, scheduling and client management for local service businesses — salons, clinics, studios. Visit Shore — affiliate link

airSlate (SignNow / pdfFiller)

E-signature and document workflows — the paperwork half of running client engagements. Visit airSlate — affiliate link

Instapage

Landing page builder aimed at paid-ad campaigns, with post-click optimization tooling. Visit Instapage — affiliate link

Hello Bar

Popups, alert bars and lead-capture forms for converting existing traffic. Visit Hello Bar — affiliate link

AdCreative.ai

Generates ad creatives and banner variants scored for conversion, for teams running paid social. Visit AdCreative.ai — affiliate link

Jungle Scout

Product research and sales analytics for Amazon sellers. Visit Jungle Scout — affiliate link

Switcher Studio

Live video production and switching from iPhone and Mac — multi-camera streams without a studio. Visit Switcher Studio — affiliate link

Shor

Link-in-bio pages for routing social traffic to offers and content. Visit Shor — affiliate link

How this page works

No tool in the categories above appears because it has an affiliate program. Each appears because we verified its pricing and wrote the breakdown linked next to it — the selection criteria and the testing method are in How We Test, and the disclosure line at the top of this page applies to it as to every page on this site. Prices move; the verification date on each claim is part of the claim. The Current partnerships section works differently and is labeled as such: those are approved affiliate relationships, linked directly, with no price claims attached until we have verified them and published a breakdown. When a partnership is approved for a tool already listed above, its vendor link becomes an affiliate link and costs you nothing either way.