🧞♂️ New to Exponential Scale? Each week, I provide tools, tips, and tricks for tiny teams with big ambitions that want to scale big. For more: Exponential Scale Podcast | Scalebrate | Scalebrate Hub
Founding Supporters: Support the following people and companies because they supported us from the beginning: DataEI | Dr. Bob Schatz | .Tech Domains | Fairman Studios | Jean-Philippe Martin | RocketSmart AI | UMBC
In today's newsletter:
Latest Podcasts: What You Missed
Want to Scale? ICP: Do You Know Me? – If your business feels busy but not scalable, this episode shows how a fuzzy ICP quietly kills leverage, margins, and momentum and how dialing it in changes everything.
The 10 Money Skills Every Microteam Should Master - You’re great at what you do. But if the money side of your business feels confusing, stressful, or weirdly fragile, this episode is required listening.
What Can You Learn from 22 Microteam Success Stories? (…Plus 1) - Real microteams, real results, and the repeatable patterns behind outsized growth with tiny teams… and one notable failure.
Interview with Wade Foster, CEO of Zapier - How Zapier scaled with leverage, automation, and focus instead of hiring and organizational bloat.
Interview with Fabian Veit, CEO of Make - How advanced automation helps microteams remove busywork and scale faster without added headcount.
You've seen the bait-and-switch before:
"Free forever!" the website says. Then you hit user limit #4, contact #501, or storage byte #100,000,001 and suddenly you're staring at a paywall.
That's not what this list is about.
This is about tools that are actually, legitimately, 100% free. No freemium traps. No "free for 14 days." No hidden paywalls waiting to ambush you when you hit traction.
These are open-source projects, community-funded tools, and platforms that are free because their business model doesn't depend on converting you to a paid plan.
For each tool below, you'll see:
What paid tool it replaces
Upside: Why the free version is worth using
Downside: What you sacrifice vs. the paid alternative
Let's build your $0/month microteam stack.
What Success Looks Like for Microteams
For a microteam running on 100% free tools, success means:
Complete ownership without vendor lock-in. Your data lives where you want it. You're not trapped in a proprietary ecosystem that can change pricing or terms whenever they want.
Trade-offs you actually understand. Free doesn't mean "worse." It means different trade-offs: setup complexity for cost savings, self-hosting for data control, community support for 24/7 SLAs.
Strategic use of your limited budget. If you're spending $0 on software, you can spend that money on what actually matters: hiring, marketing, or just extending your runway.
Common failure modes:
Mistaking "free" for "no cost": Free tools cost time to set up and maintain. Factor that in.
Using free tools that waste more time than they save: A clunky free tool that adds 2 hours/week of friction costs more than a $20/month tool that saves you time.
Not reading the license: Some "free" tools have commercial-use restrictions or require attribution.
Ignoring paid tools when they make sense: If a $50/month tool saves you 20 hours/month, just pay for it.
Success for a microteam is running 100% free tools where they make sense, and strategically paying for tools where the ROI is obvious.
The Resources
We've organized these into communication, project management, design, development, email marketing, and productivity tools. Every single one is completely free.