The $0 Solopreneur AI Stack: Every Free Tool You Need

You don't need to spend $200/month on software to run a business with AI. You don't even need to spend $20.

Every tool in the stack I'm about to walk you through has a free tier. Not a 7-day trial. Not a "free with an asterisk." Actually free, with enough functionality to run a real business generating real revenue.

The philosophy is simple: start at $0, prove the model works, and upgrade only when revenue demands it. Not when a tool nags you with upgrade prompts. Not when you feel like you "should" be on a paid plan. Only when a specific, measurable limit is actively blocking you from making money.

Here's every tool in the stack, exactly what you get for free, and the honest limits you'll hit.

The Complete Free Stack

This is the full tool breakdown for running a one-person business. Eleven tools. Zero dollars per month. Let's go through each one.

Claude: Your Strategist, Writer, and Chief of Staff

Claude's free tier gives you access to the same model that powers the paid plan. You get a daily message limit that resets every few hours, and it's enough to write blog posts, draft emails, brainstorm strategy, build marketing plans, and create customer support templates.

What you actually get: Full access to Claude's intelligence. Conversation history. File uploads for analysis. Enough daily messages to handle 2-3 hours of focused work.

Honest limits: You'll hit the daily message cap during heavy work sessions. Long conversations can lose context. No access to the Projects feature for organizing work.

When to upgrade ($20/mo): You're hitting the daily message limit 3 days in a row. That's the signal. If you're bumping into it once a week, stay free.

Notion: Your Second Brain and Operations Hub

Notion's free plan gives you unlimited pages, unlimited blocks, and sharing with up to 10 guests. That covers your knowledge base, project management, SOPs, and content calendar.

Honest limits: 5MB file upload cap. 7-day version history. 10-guest limit.

When to upgrade ($10/mo): You need 30 days of version history or more than 10 collaborators. Most solopreneurs never need to.

Canva: Your Designer

Canva's free tier handles about 90% of what a solopreneur needs. 250,000+ templates, drag-and-drop editor, basic photo editing, and 5GB of storage. You won't win design awards, but you'll look professional.

Honest limits: No background remover. No brand kit. Limited stock photos. No Magic Resize for repurposing across platforms.

When to upgrade ($13/mo): You're creating content for 3+ platforms and manually resizing every graphic. Magic Resize alone saves hours per week.

DALL-E: Your Image Creator

ChatGPT's free tier includes DALL-E image generation. Limited daily generations, but enough for blog headers, social graphics, and product mockups.

Honest limits: Tight daily caps. Lower resolution on free. No editing or variations.

When to upgrade: Only if you need high-volume daily generation. Most solopreneurs batch image creation and the free tier covers it.

Lovable: Your Developer

This is the one that still blows my mind. Lovable lets you build and ship web applications by describing what you want in plain English. The free tier gives you enough credits to build and iterate on a real product.

What you actually get: AI-powered app building. Deployment to a live URL. Database integration. Authentication. Enough monthly credits to build an MVP.

Honest limits: Credits run out fast if you're making lots of small changes instead of batching requests. Complex applications eat credits quickly. You'll learn to write better prompts to conserve them.

When to upgrade ($20/mo): You've shipped your MVP and customers are using it. You need to iterate faster than the free credits allow. This is a good problem to have.

Make.com: Your Operations Manager

Make.com is the nervous system that connects everything else. It's how you automate the repeatable stuff: new customer signs up, welcome email goes out, Notion database updates, Slack notification fires. The free tier gives you 1,000 operations per month.

What you actually get: 1,000 operations/month. 2 active scenarios. Access to all integrations (1,000+ apps). 15-minute minimum interval between runs.

Honest limits: 1,000 operations sounds like a lot until you realize a single scenario with 5 steps uses 5 operations per run. That's 200 runs per month, or about 6-7 per day. Two active scenarios is also tight.

When to upgrade ($9/mo): You're consistently using 800+ operations before the month ends. The $9 Core plan gives you 10,000 operations, a 10x jump that most businesses won't outgrow for a long time.

Kit (ConvertKit): Your Email Marketing Team

Kit's free plan supports up to 10,000 subscribers. Ten thousand. You get unlimited landing pages, forms, and email broadcasts with basic tagging and segmentation.

Honest limits: No visual automations (basic sequences only). No A/B testing. Kit branding on forms.

When to upgrade ($25/mo): You need visual automation sequences for sophisticated funnels, or you've hit 10,000 subscribers. Either way, you have a real business at that point.

Buffer: Your Social Media Manager

Buffer's free plan gives you 3 connected channels with 10 scheduled posts per channel. For a solopreneur focusing on 2-3 platforms, that's a functional starting point.

Honest limits: 10 posts per channel means refilling the queue every few days. No analytics. No engagement tools.

When to upgrade ($5/mo per channel): You're posting daily and logging in every 2 days just to refill. Paid gives you unlimited scheduled posts plus analytics.

Crisp: Your Customer Support Agent

Crisp's free tier gives you a live chat widget with a shared inbox and mobile app. Basic, but it handles the core job: letting customers reach you and keeping conversations organized.

Honest limits: No chatbot. No knowledge base. No automated responses. Limited widget customization.

When to upgrade ($25/mo): You're getting 5-10+ support messages daily and need a chatbot for common questions. Below that volume, just reply manually.

Wave: Your Bookkeeper

Wave is completely free for accounting, invoicing, and receipt scanning. Not a free tier. The whole product is free. They make money on payment processing and payroll, which you won't need as a zero-employee company.

Honest limits: UI isn't as polished as QuickBooks. No inventory tracking. Limited integrations. Slower support.

When to upgrade: You might never need to. Wave handles accounting well into six figures of revenue.

Stripe: Your Payment Processor

Stripe has no monthly fee. You pay 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction. Payment links, checkout pages, subscription billing, invoicing, and revenue dashboards, all included.

Honest limits: Transaction fees add up at volume. Dashboard has a learning curve. Payouts take 2 business days.

When to upgrade: There are no tiers. You pay per transaction from day one. Cost scales linearly with revenue, the fairest model possible.

The Real Monthly Cost at Each Stage

Here's what your actual spending looks like as you grow. These aren't theoretical. They're the specific upgrade triggers based on real usage patterns.

Read that bottom row again. Even at the fully upgraded $47/month, you're replacing $15,500-26,000/month in traditional team costs. That's not an exaggeration. It's basic math.

The $0 stage isn't about being cheap. It's about proving your business model works before you spend anything on tools. If your idea can't generate revenue with free tools, paid tools won't save it.

What This Stack Replaces in Salary Terms

Let's be specific about the roles this stack covers and what they'd cost if you hired humans:

• Content writer ($3,000-5,000/mo) → Claude handles blog posts, emails, social copy, ad copy, and product descriptions
• Graphic designer ($2,500-4,000/mo) → Canva + DALL-E handle social graphics, presentations, blog images, and brand assets
• Web developer ($5,000-8,000/mo) → Lovable builds and ships features you describe in plain English
• Marketing ops ($2,500-4,000/mo) → Make.com + Kit + Buffer handle automations, email sequences, and social scheduling
• Customer support rep ($2,000-3,500/mo) → Crisp provides live chat and organized support
• Bookkeeper ($500-1,500/mo) → Wave handles accounting, invoicing, and financial reporting

Total replaced salary: $15,500-26,000 per month. Your cost: $0-47. That's the math that makes the zero employee model work.

When to Upgrade: The Specific Triggers

The biggest mistake solopreneurs make is upgrading tools out of anxiety instead of necessity. Here are the exact signals that mean it's time.

Upgrade Claude when you're hitting the daily message limit 3 days in a row. Not once. Not twice. Three consecutive days means AI is core to your daily workflow and the free tier is a genuine bottleneck.

Upgrade Canva when you're manually resizing the same design for 3+ platforms every time you post. The Magic Resize feature saves 20-30 minutes per piece of content.

Upgrade Make.com when you're hitting 800+ operations before the month ends. Don't wait until you hit the wall. Give yourself a buffer.

Upgrade Buffer when you're logging in every 2 days just to refill a 10-post queue. That defeats the purpose of scheduling.

Everything else? Stay free until the limitation is costing you actual revenue. Not hypothetical revenue. Not "I think I need it." Actual money you're leaving on the table because of the limitation.

How to Wire It All Together

A list of tools isn't a system. The real leverage comes from connecting them so they work as a team.

Example: You write a blog post with Claude and publish it. Make.com triggers a scenario that schedules social posts to Buffer, sends an email to your Kit subscribers, and logs everything in Notion. You touched it once. It deployed everywhere.

That kind of agent setup is what turns 11 separate tools into one cohesive system. The tools are free. The wiring is what makes them powerful.

And that's exactly what the playbook teaches: not just which tools to use, but how to connect them into automations that run your business while you focus on the work only you can do.

Start Today. Spend Nothing.

You can sign up for every tool on this list in under an hour. No credit cards. No trials. No commitments.

Start with Claude and one task you do repeatedly. Write tomorrow's email. Draft a social post. Outline your next product. Then add one more tool. Then connect two of them with Make.com.

Within a week, you'll have a stack that would have cost $15,000+ in salaries running for exactly $0. Upgrade when you need to. Not before.