We Indians are notoriously cheap, second possibly only to the Chinese. There are countless comics in the US that make fun of both ethnicities, but for us it a point of pride, a virtue borne out of years of trying to make do with less. You can call it whatever you want, we like to say that we are “careful” with money.
Nowhere is that trait more useful than in a startup or, in my case, as the owner of a small business, where you are trying to stretch every dollar. So I have compiled a list of resources that are free or nearly free that could help keep a small business humming. While the list is US-centric, it might be of special interest to those of you who are just getting started in the US and trying to control your expenses.
Here goes.
VoIP Telephony – Almost everyone has Internet. Piggybacking a telephone service on top of your Internet connection gives you cheap International calling, and, if that is important to you, you get a US number in the process. Vonage, Ooma and Magicjack are just some of the many services available. Vonage, for about $30/month gives you International calling to 60 countries. Now that is a pretty sweet deal.
Google Voice – It is a free service that gives you one number (usually a US number) to map any phone number you want to. So you get one number that your clients can call and be routed to wherever you want to take the call. It also offers voicemail which is a big plus.
Prepaid Cell Phone (for US) – Most US carriers tie you into two year contracts. If you do the math, you more than pay for your device and extortionist rates for voice, text and data over the two years. Last year I discovered MVNOs (Mobile Virtual Network Operators) and switched my cell phone to prepaid. MVNOs are companies that buy excess bandwidth from the major carriers and then sell prepaid plans on this bandwidth. So, if you like a certain carrier, say AT&T, all you have to do is find an MVNO that works with AT&T and pay a monthly, flat, prepaid fee for service. You do have to buy your own device but you still come out ahead. Now, I do realize this is a model that is prevalent in the rest of the world but for reasons that I don’t want to get into in this post, the model has traditionally been very different in the US.
Conference Calling – Conference calls are a must for many companies. Skype, Lync and Google Hangouts are some of the options available to companies at a low cost. However, there is another option available that is absolutely free. The only catch being that you get a US based number to dial into and you don’t get an 800 number. So, what’s the catch? None really. It really is a legit business for many companies like freeconferencecall.com (to see how they make money, look here ).
Web conference – Critical for sharing a presentation. Google hangouts, Skype are great options. I use join.me, it is free and works like a charm.
Legal Help – While for anything heavy-duty, I’d recommend using a lawyer, for lightweight stuff, there are plenty of cheaper options. Legalzoom is a great resource for everything from creating a company to getting basic confidentiality agreements in place.
Email, Calendar, Collaboration – Google Apps for business is wonderful. They used to offer it for free for businesses up to 5 employees. Now they charge $5/month/user, which is still a steal for a full suite of office applications like email, document sharing, calendar, shared storage and hangouts.
Accounting – I use Quickbooks Online Simple Start. At $12.95/month, it more than meets my needs and at the end of the year I have one place I do my taxes from. It tracks expenses, generates invoices and my credit card company directly links to it and I can suck in all my business transactions into Quickbooks and assign them to different buckets easily.
Credit Cards – I had a credit card for the longest time that had no redeeming features other than the fact it had no annual fee and didn’t charge overseas transaction costs. You can do better. You can get a card that gives you cash back, has no annual fee and does not charge any foreign transaction fee (especially important to those of us who travel internationally). If you travel internationally, you can also look at getting a card that gives your airline points and airport lounge access. For a few hundred dollars a year you get some pretty nice facilities. This might be important to those of us who travel a lot.
Lounge Access at Airports – Some banks offer free membership to Priority Club that is a sweet deal for those of us who travel a lot. My Indian bank offers me that privilege. You may want to check and see what your options are.
These are just some of the things that I use regularly. Clearly there are many more. If you have other tips and tricks or simply a viewpoint, please do share your thoughts.