And I don’t spend it lightly. I’m a thrifty guy. I pay for tools only when they really serve me in some way. And I’m a huge fan of freebies that keep my bills down.
Here you’ll find a list of the tools, apps, and platforms that I am actively using or have used in the past. There is nothing on this list that I haven’t tested out myself, and all recommendations were written with complete honesty.
If you’re just starting out as a freelancer or in the SEO industry, you may not be able to spend as much on these tools. Start with the free and cheap ones, and as your business grows, add more into your own tech stack. Remember: Everything you use is a tax write-off! Cha-ching.
I will continue to update this toolbox, so check back often! And be sure to check out my other SEO and freelancer resources:
🤑The Freelancer’s Lead Generation Guide
🚀SEO Bridge Builders: Launch Your SEO Freelance Career
💪One-on-One Freelancer Mentorship
🧠Free Resources for SEO Freelancers
🤓My Top Advice for Freelancers & SEO Nerds
These are the tools I use to manage and improve my life as a freelancer. Time management, client relationships, marketing—these are the tools that help me get it all done and done well.
| Tool | Price | Primary Task | Recommendations & How to Use It |
|---|---|---|---|
| Moxie | $16/month | ⚙️Managing your freelance business | My go-to tool for organizing my freelance life. I do all my invoicing, pitching, time-tracking, project planning, and expense tracking on this tool. It’s improving all the time, and I already love it. Highly recommend. (PS Full transparency, the link here gives me a referral, and gives you a 30-day trial. But feel free to just log in on WithMoxie.com if you’d rather take a peek first.) |
| ElementorPro | $59/year for 1 website | 💻Building a pretty website | If you want to know what I use to manage my own website, it’s built with WordPress and designed with Elementor Pro. It’s not the only way to design a website, or even the best. But it has worked for me and therefore it makes the list! |
| AuthoredUp | Free (for now) | 📢Using LinkedIn effectively | This amazing LinkedIn extension helps you visualize post, reuse old posts, and analyze your posts/audience on LinkedIn better than anything else. It’s free for now, but I’ll be paying for this one even if it’s a little expensive, because it’s so useful. A must if you plan to use LinkedIn to market your freelance business. |
| ConvertKit | $25 per month | 📩 Email marketing | This is my chosen email marketing platform. There are many to choose from, and most will do the same thing (each with its own benefits and flaws). This is the one I use, and I’m sticking with it because it’s worked quite well for me so far and is very intuitive. |
| Zoom | $16 per month | 📞 Video calls | I use Zoom to record and manage all calls with clients. The price is worth the control the tool gives me over my schedule, as well as the ability to easily record. Plus, everyone knows how to use it. |
| Calendly | $10 per month | 📆 Easy meeting scheduling | Calendly helps me manage my schedule and gather leads. You can set your available hours, and make it easy for anyone to book a meeting with you by sharing a link. Makes for easy calls-to-action, and can be very useful for qualifying freelance leads. |
| TimeAndDate.com | Free | 🌏International meeting management | Managing clients in different time zones? This tool makes setting up meetings, which is typically a headache-inducing nightmare, much simpler. You can select different locations around the world, and it gives you a nice color-coded chart showing when the best meeting times are. Totally free, baby. |
| Loom | Free | 🎥 Quick video/screen recording | If you don’t plan to use Descript, then Loom is a useful tool for recording short video recordings of yourself or your screen. Great for sending quick information to clients, or providing custom insights to impress new leads. |
| Notion | Free | 📋 Making lists, content, and just about anything | The tool I used to make this list, and many of the other “living” documents I use for managing my own business and creating sharable content like this. There’s a learning curve, but its recent addition of an AI tool and its excellent training documents can make it easy to make useful assets in a snap. |
| 1Password | $2.99 per month | 🔏 Protecting your business | If you are dealing with clients’ sensitive information, then you need to take your own cybersecurity seriously. 1Passwords is my favorite password management tool, and gives me a lot of peace of mind when it comes to safeguarding my business. |
| Monarch Money | $100/year | 💸 Monitoring your money | Budgeting well is part of being a good freelancer. This tool does the trick. |
| Quickbooks Self-Employed | $12/month | 🪙 Financial tracking, paying taxes | This is the cheapest version of Quickbooks you can get, and it does everything you need if you work solo. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of better alternatives when it comes to calculating and paying taxes. Having Quickbooks to keep track of this stuff helps. |
| Session Buddy | Free (Chrome Extension) | 🕸️ Digital organization | This Chrome extension allows you to save groups of tabs. So useful for staying organized and not losing important tabs as you’re researching and juggling multiple clients. |
| Toggl | Free | ⏱️ Time tracking | I use Moxie to do my time tracking now, but if you don’t plan to use this tool, then I highly recommend using Toggl to track your time. Tracking your time is key to learning how to price your SEO services. |
| Beautiful.ai | Free version, Pro version $12/month | 🤩 Making pretty presentations | Making aesthetic presentations is a lot easier with this AI-powered slide builder. Upload your brand colors and logos, use their super fast templates, and it will take care of all the annoying stuff (setting fonts, adjusting images, etc.) Great for simple presentation. Start with the Pro free trial, and if you only use it lightly, downgrade to the free version (or pay for Pro if that’s your thing). |