Most things in life aren’t free, but the Internet has made it pretty cheap for small business owners to run their office. From email to collaboration software, there’s a host of ways you can get your business up and running without paying a bundle.
“It's really easy to go the free route when you're small or just starting out,” says Mario Schulzke, founder of IdeaMensch,
an online community designed to help people bring their ideas to life. “With increased growth, it's oftentimes a good idea to up your technology investments as well. Most times smart tech investments pay for themselves.”
According to experts, before you start adopting free or low cost applications you have to figure out which parts of your business are mission critical and which aren’t. For instance Chuck Fried, president and chief executive of TxMQ, an IT services company, says using free software for email or collaboration may make sense, but putting ALL of your customer data on a free customer relationship management app could spell disaster.
At TxMQ, Fried says they use a lot of Google apps for things like email and calendaring, but the company doesn’t only use just free. While he isn’t a fan of completely free, he does say there are a lot of low cost options available to small business owners because of the growth in cloud computing.
“The dangerous part for small business owners is if they run into some challenges and need to get a hold of somebody at say, Google, you basically can’t,” says Fried. “If you need something tweaked or changed you are stuck.”
Read more from Fox Business