How to reduce your technology costs

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. This article was inspired by NetSuite pricing (an ERP vendor) whose costs drove me to look for better economic alternatives for my business. I have learned that I can do most of the day to day tasks efficiently using tools that cost me nothing. Only the Lord knows why this stuff isn't evryday knowledge for most business folks. It really annoys me that someone hasn't shared the knowledge here with small business owners.

Do these 3 things right away to start saving money.

• Ten minutes every day searching for a specific type of tool.
• Capture the detail of everything you find (and your experiences) on Evernote.com ($0).
• Spend 10 mins. everyday giving your findings a very quick try.

In one month from now you should have found a really good list of free tools to help you cut costs and run your business. OK, fast start for you a small selection of the tools I use everyday that work well and you should take a look at.

On the left you will find software that in most instances is free (with the exception of a few which have upgrades with more features to paid versions) and on the right to make it easier to identify their mainstream equivalents I have listed the software you will definitely have to part money for.

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...