It seems like every day there are a dozen new SaaS products and tools launching and marketing to entrepreneurs, startups, and small business owners on every social media platform known to man. Most of them are indistinguishable from one another and almost all of them charge a monthly subscription after a short trial period. This is just the way of the world we live in right now.
As a cheap frugal small business owner myself, the idea of continuously paying for access to the same tools month after month drives me crazy. It’s just wasteful. So my business partner and I got together and decided to create a master list of free platforms that we can leverage to streamline operations.
Every business needs design work, from marketing materials to web design. So here’s a list of the top 10 free design tools that we believe every entrepreneur, startup, and small business owner should leverage. While some of these tools offer premium subscriptions, all of them offer unlimited free versions at the time of writing this article.
Please note: We are not affiliated with any of these platforms and do not receive any incentive to post about them.
- Canva
Link: https://www.canva.com/
Canva is an intuitive and comprehensive design platform. You start by selecting the type of design you’d like to create and canva will automatically create a blank canvas with the ideal dimensions. For example, if you’re designing a post for your instagram channel, you select the instagram post template and canva will start you with a blank 1080px x 1080px canvas. From there, designing is as simple as drag and drop.
- Photopea
Link: https://www.photopea.com/
Photopea is simply a free cloud-based version of photoshop. If you’ve ever used photoshop or GIMP before then Photopea will come very naturally to you.
- Remove BG
Link: https://www.remove.bg/
Remove BG removes the background from any image you upload. Great for cleaning up headshots. It’s a highly niche product but it’s extremely straightforward and easy to use.
- unDraw
Link: https://undraw.co/
unDraw is a small database of open-source illustrations that you can use completely free and without attribution. This is a great replacement for anywhere that you’d normally use stock photos. Plus, they allow you to customize the color to match your brand.
- Jitter
Link: https://jitter.video/
Jitter is video animation made simple. If you’re looking to do any basic video animation, I highly recommend using Jitter. I have yet to find a free product that makes video animation this easy.
- Feather Icons
Link: https://feathericons.com/
Feather Icons is a pretty decent sized collection of free to use icons. We’ve found this to be useful for some unique use-cases like menu icons for mobile applications we’ve built. It’s a quick and cheap way to avoid hiring a graphic designer to create custom icons that most people won’t even notice, without compromising the UX.
- Pexels
Link: https://www.pexels.com/
Pexels is a database of free to use high resolution stock photos. Plain, simple, very useful.
- Unsplash
Link: https://unsplash.com/
If you couldn’t find anything you liked on Pexels, check out Unsplash. It’s also a database of free to use high resolution stock photos. Also plain and simple.
- Figma
Link: https://www.figma.com/
Figma is great for whiteboarding and designing wireframes. It comes with a great free version and is very easy to use.
- Magic Eraser
Link: https://www.magiceraser.io/
Magic Eraser is a very cool tool that uses AI to remove unwanted things from any image. You upload the image, highlight whatever item(s) you want to remove, and Magic Eraser makes it like it was never there.
If you’d like a full list of free platforms for startups and small businesses that we’ve found so far, please feel free to take a look at our free resources here. We’re always looking for more free platforms and tools to add to our list of free resources, so please don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any suggestions! (That’s how we discovered Magic Eraser)
Here’s how you can get in touch with Modern Launch:
Email: contact@modernlaunch.co
Website: https://modernlaunch.co/
Contact Form: https://modernlaunch.co/#contact-us