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20 Tools For The Freelance Designer On A Shoestring Budget

August 10, 2009 by Jon 74 Comments

In your career as a freelance designer you’ll probably use tens, if not hundreds, of different tools to perform all the tasks needed to run your business. From image editors to accounting apps to text editors. There’s no way I could list all the tools available in one post, and if I did they would range from being completely free to costing an arm and a leg. So I thought I’d focus on the least expensive ones.

All these tools and services are either free or pretty cheap, considering what can be done with them, and can be great replacements to the more expensive ones we’re used to. The ones on this list probably won’t break the bank! :)

Image Editors ↓

Of course nothing’s gonna replace Photoshop, but you can do a lot with PixelMator, Gimp or even SplashUp, a web-based app.

PixelMator

PixelMator

Gimp

Gimp

SplashUp

SplashUp

Feedback And Usability Testing ↓

Getting feedback on your designs is essential, no need to ask friends and family (you’d probably get the ‘looks good‘ type of answers anyway). Instead you can use services like Concept Feedback, FeedbackArmy and Five Second Test.

Concept Feedback

Concept Feedback

Five Second Test

5 Second Test

Feedback Army

Feedback Army

Color Tools ↓

My 2 favorites: Colour Lovers and Adobe Kuler. They’re both free.

Colour Lovers

Colour Lovers

Adobe Kuler

Adobe Kuler

Billing, Invoicing, and Time-Tracking ↓

I’m a hardcore Freshbooks fan, but Invoice Machine and Billings are awesome too! And very inexpensive.

Freshbooks Invoicing

Freshbooks

Invoice Machine

Invoice Machine

Billings 3

Billings 3

QuickBooks Free Invoice Creator

Invoice Home

invoicetemplates

Cross-Browser Compatibility ↓

When you design websites you need to make sure everything looks good in different browsers (die IE6!). I personally chose to install Parallels to run Windows and test in Internet Explorer, but services like Litmus App, or even the free BrowserShots, are great for checking your sites in different browsers.

Litmus App

Litmus App

BrowserShots

BrowserShots

Parallels

Parallels

Local Testing ↓

Mamp is awesome! Use it to setup a local test environment. A must have for coding and testing without affecting a live site. There’s a free and a pro version.

Mamp

MAMP

Coding & Programming ↓

My favorite text editor is TextWrangler, but I’ve tried TextMate and NotePad+ before and they’re both really good! And cheap!

Text Wrangler

TextWrangler

NotePad+

NotePad+

Text Mate

TextMate

Images and Photos ↓

Whether you’re looking for inspiration or for some images to use in your designs, Flickr and DeviantART are 2 must-use websites. Make sure you check the licenses before using any images you find on those sites.

Flickr

Flickr

DeviantArt

deviantART

Your Turn To Talk

I’m curious to know what tools you use as a freelance designer. Are you just starting out or you’ve been freelancing for a while? And when your freelance business started to take off, did you buy more expensive tools, or you just stuck with what you had? Let us know in the comment section! :)

Filed Under: Design, Resources, Tools Tagged With: freelancer tips, tools

Comments

  1. Stuart Hobday says

    August 10, 2009 at 2:23 pm

    Great article. A freelance on a budget is me. I use Pixelmator, Coda, Invoice Machine and CMS platforms. When on a PC I use Filezilla and Notepad ++

  2. Abounding Media says

    August 10, 2009 at 2:34 pm

    There are at least three tools here I had never seen, but will check out right away. I guess Aviary could have been added to the list. I sometimes use it for a quick edit of screenshots, or other graphics. Very easy to use and free.

  3. icetrix says

    August 10, 2009 at 2:52 pm

    Some apps I never heard of. Great list.

    Another great Browser testing site is http://www.xenocode.com/. It is is only for Windows… but it can run IE6 on vista!

  4. Benjamin Charity says

    August 10, 2009 at 3:34 pm

    Coda, Espresso, and CSSEdit are incredible coding programs. I use billable for billing.

  5. Akhtar says

    August 10, 2009 at 4:20 pm

    Great list thnaks for share!

  6. Marilyn says

    August 10, 2009 at 4:55 pm

    I’m interesting in starting some freelance work, and really appreciate that you compiled this list of inexpensive (and free!) resources. I know about deviantart and flickr and think they’re great, but I hadn’t heard of the rest of the resources. Thanks.

  7. Kim H says

    August 10, 2009 at 6:12 pm

    I also strongly recommend Coda – it’s a bit more expensive (will run you around $100), but I absolutely love it (probably more than I do TextMate, admittedly).

    Also, iClockr for keeping track of how many hours I put into a project (regardless of whether its flat-rate or hourly, I find that keeping track of how much time is spent on projects is invaluable).

  8. Boxed In Design says

    August 10, 2009 at 6:58 pm

    Great resources! There were many I never heard of before, and I’m cheap. :)

  9. Danny | dannyhinde.com says

    August 10, 2009 at 7:57 pm

    Awesome selection, reminded me of a couple of sites I need to register on!

  10. Rick says

    August 10, 2009 at 8:17 pm

    I would also like to add lessaccounting. I have been using them for a while and they are quite good.

  11. Kenneth Dahlin says

    August 11, 2009 at 12:31 am

    Hi there i see you forgot http://www.sxc.hu/

    it is the best free stock foto site that i have found on the net, i have done a lot of webdesigning on the basis of the photos there.

  12. aHan says

    August 11, 2009 at 2:42 am

    Great tools!Thanks for sharing.

  13. Rene says

    August 11, 2009 at 3:53 am

    Thanks for the list, it was right on time. I was about to start searching for some tools you’ve listed and found all I needed here. Giving it thumbs up in Stumble also.

  14. David King says

    August 11, 2009 at 5:18 am

    Brilliant list, thanks Jon!

  15. Sean Hurley says

    August 11, 2009 at 10:09 am

    I am a proud user of Gimp and notepad++

  16. Lakshan says

    August 11, 2009 at 10:42 am

    If you are a freelance designer with a tight budget, let me introduce CurdBee (http://curdbee.com) for invoicing. We are a simple, solid invoicing application specially designed for freelancers and small businesses. We inspired to build it to scratch our own itch, after being dissatisfied with the restrictions of other invoicing solutions. Later, we realized it could help many other freelancers like us – so we’ve launched it as a totally FREE application.

    We offers unlimited invoices, clients, multiple currencies and PayPal/Google Checkout integration. If you need extra customizations, security, modules such as estimates & recurring invoices, you can upgrade your plan to PRO version, which would cost you only $5 per month.

    So don’t waste your hard earned money for invoicing – be wise and consider using CurdBee.

  17. Joe Piekarz says

    August 11, 2009 at 11:08 am

    TimeXchange.net is less than a buck/week and lets freelancers can enable collaborative reporting of time with other freelancers and clients.

    You can check it out at http://www.timeXchange.net

  18. Susanna K. says

    August 11, 2009 at 11:23 am

    Thanks! Very useful stuff. Here’s the site I use most often for free images: http://www.morguefile.com

    I like the lightboxes and find there’s less noise than with flickr.

  19. Jessica says

    August 11, 2009 at 1:07 pm

    Many of our time tracking and billing clients are freelance designers and freelancers. They use our free version which accommodates for one user.

  20. Kevin says

    August 11, 2009 at 1:32 pm

    Great list. A lot of resources I have not heard of but need to checkout. The tool I need the most is a Windows version of isMamp to setup a local test environment.

  21. Andy owen says

    August 11, 2009 at 3:27 pm

    Aptana Studio is an awesome, free IDE with way too many useful features
    to list here…

  22. Henry says

    August 11, 2009 at 3:36 pm

    This should absolutely have made this great list: VirtualBox. It’s great for running multiple OS’s.

  23. Raj says

    August 12, 2009 at 1:32 am

    They are all very useful tools..

  24. Luc says

    August 12, 2009 at 4:37 am

    Great list ! i discover new tools as Litmus App. Very useful, Thanks!

  25. Luci says

    August 12, 2009 at 5:08 am

    Wow there’s some programs on this list that i’ve never even heard of! I’ll probably try a few of these out, though I love kuler and i’m not sure i can be pulled away from it, even by colour lovers!

    Thanks for the list, looks like it could be really useful!

  26. Teo says

    August 12, 2009 at 5:15 am

    Being a freelance web designer/developer I am using couple of services from the above list and would recommend them for anyone with similar needs,

    Adobe Kular – If you are looking for colors and combinations this is really cool.

    Litmus – It has saved more hours which I spent on doing browser compatibility before I found this. Can you reduce the price? Please…

    CurdBee (in comments) – Awesome app for sending invoices online. I am saving both my money and time thanks to this app.

    SXC.hu – Don’t pay for Stockphotos before trying this one. You’ll feel sorry for yourself if you do so :)

  27. Rayanne Langdon says

    August 12, 2009 at 11:19 am

    Thanks for thinking of FreshBooks when you made this list, Jon. Thanks even more for being a hardcore fan : )

    Rayanne Langdon — Queen of Hearts, FreshBooks.com

  28. BebopDesigner says

    August 12, 2009 at 4:41 pm

    What a brilliant selection! Thanks a million, this is really handy.

  29. Matt says

    August 12, 2009 at 9:13 pm

    Very nice list, thanks for sharing.

  30. Peter K says

    August 13, 2009 at 4:09 am

    I have never heard of most of these amazing tools – I am glad the weekend is right around the corner – I will be checking them out for sure.

  31. fabrica muebles says

    August 13, 2009 at 5:20 am

    Great article. Excelent freeware tools to designer´s.

    Thanks!

  32. Karen says

    August 13, 2009 at 12:56 pm

    There is a neat little desktop tool called Fanurio http://www.fanuriotimetracking.com . I love it! You can try it for free too. You can just click to start, pause it, etc and you can do nifty reports. I use it to track the time I spend on client projects.

    Even though I only bill hourly for consulting projects, it helps me to see how much time I’m spending to make sure my rates are in line. With Fanurio you can customize invoice templates using your own layouts and export them to HTML or PDF.

  33. John says

    August 14, 2009 at 5:03 pm

    I think it is great that you mentioned Gimp. It is a great program, especially for those of us venturing out into the linux world and using distros like ubuntu.

    I would also suggest freelancers take a look at Intervals, a web-based time/task/project tracking app that handles freelancing workflow end-to-end.

  34. Robin Bastien says

    August 15, 2009 at 3:29 am

    Man, I’ve been looking for something like Concept Feedback forever, so I’m glad you mentioned it. I would like to second adding Coda, it’s much better priced than Dreamweaver, lighter weight, and is optimized for mac. Also in terms of social networking for freelancers, behance.net is the bomb.

  35. yoxx says

    August 16, 2009 at 5:07 am

    gimp is awesome!

  36. Pablo Lara H says

    August 16, 2009 at 1:39 pm

    I recommend Expono.com as a good service to host images and illustrations. They are in several languages and they have a lot of storage capacity.

  37. Kelly Thomas says

    August 17, 2009 at 1:59 am

    Hi!
    Great article. Your article is very impressive. This is good source of money so it was great to went through your site.
    Good Day

  38. Shane Rielly says

    August 17, 2009 at 11:40 am

    IE Tester is a great tool. http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage
    It’s browser that has a few IE versions in it and you can open different versions in tabs.

  39. OyoKooN says

    August 17, 2009 at 2:42 pm

    I’m using E – TextEditor which is a copy of TextMate for Windows.
    It use TextMate’s themes and snippets.

    This is a very powerfull and easy to use editor.

    You can try it at http://www.e-texteditor.com/ and buy it for $34.95 or 26.23€.

  40. Indranil says

    August 18, 2009 at 4:57 am

    Great list! Some very nice programs there. For invoicing, I use CurdBee, which is a lovely free invoicing app.

  41. ooKooDoo says

    August 18, 2009 at 9:57 am

    Smultron is as well a nice free text editor.

    Nice list thanks !

  42. EBook Covers says

    August 19, 2009 at 11:04 am

    I’m a huge fan of GIMP. I’ve found that it can do everything I need for designing anything on the Web. And you can’t beat the pricetag of FREE, since it’s open-source.

  43. Hôtels says

    August 19, 2009 at 11:18 am

    Real’ nice post with a lot of resourceful websites and apps! Bookmarked! Commenters added great tools too.. maybe you should add them to your [soon to be, updated] list..!

  44. Chris says

    August 19, 2009 at 5:58 pm

    You didn’t mention aviary.com , it helps when Im away from my dearest illustrator.

  45. Dennis Stokholm says

    August 21, 2009 at 12:01 pm

    Very usefull list!

    “The tool I need the most is a Windows version of is Mamp to setup a local test environment.” #Kevin

    Check out XAMPP, it will do the trick: http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-windows.html

  46. Klaus Herdocia says

    August 22, 2009 at 10:21 am

    This is a great list thank you for the post. So many opportunities.

  47. Shane says

    August 23, 2009 at 8:38 am

    Good list. Another free decent text editor for Windoze is Rj TextEd. Rj TextEd.

  48. Michele Morgan says

    August 24, 2009 at 4:47 pm

    Great list of tools. I also use free onscreen ruler by Delphi. It measures screen in pixels. I don’t create websites, but elearning. Surely website people might find this handy too, though. There are a bunch of free ones out there, besides just Delphi though.

    Thanks,
    Michele

  49. Martin Sanders says

    August 26, 2009 at 8:49 pm

    A handy list. I use Open Office, an excellent alternative to Word and Topstyle, a CSS/HTML code editor which may be better or comparable to Dreamweaver.

  50. Adi says

    August 27, 2009 at 10:01 am

    Brilliant lists! Thanks a lot!

  51. Ruben Nunez says

    August 27, 2009 at 11:23 am

    I recently switched from Freshbooks to Ballparkapp.com for my estimating and invoicing. I found it to be alot cleaner and it doesn’t force me to have only a certain amount of clients on my account. The price is great and they have a free version as well. I would also add two free sites to this list for high quality free stock.
    1. http://www.photoxpress.com/ for excellent high quality stock photography and
    2. http://freestocktextures.com/ for awesome free stock textures.

  52. kombat says

    August 27, 2009 at 3:53 pm

    I’m surprised you didn’t mention Vim and Emacs editors. I personally use vim for all my coding tasks and find it very helpful because of its speed of use, scriptability and support for tremendous amount of programming languages.

    The ‘rails’ plugin for vim is also priceless if you do some RoR coding.

  53. Jonny | thelifething.com says

    August 27, 2009 at 6:22 pm

    Beautifully designed site. Much cred.

  54. vin says

    August 29, 2009 at 3:52 am

    Great list! I just want to share morguefile (http://morguefile.com/) if you’re looking for some more photos. (doesn’t need signing up unlike http://sxc.hu/)

    – programmers notepad (http://pnotepad.org) for your coding purposes and

    – xampp (http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html) if you dont want to use mamp. =)

  55. Andrew says

    August 30, 2009 at 2:40 am

    Thanks for the list.

    I just want to add Inkscape as an open source version of Illustrator. Granted it is to Ai what GIMP is to Ps but it has a much better UI then GIMP and fits the bill for most jobs.

    Also, Quickbooks offers a “lite” version if you have under 20 clients/vendors and best of all its FREE! :D

  56. Yan White says

    August 30, 2009 at 6:15 am

    Of course there is Firebug and the brilliant web developer tools for Firefox.
    I use ‘view document size’, ‘resize window’ and ‘ruler’ quite often!

    Dont know if you can still get it but Multiple Ie physically installs multiple versions for real world testing.

  57. Steve Ollice says

    August 31, 2009 at 9:26 pm

    Here is a good resource. Yu can’t beat free!
    http://www.opensourcemac.org/

  58. MT says

    August 31, 2009 at 11:18 pm

    For mass resizing and altering of images, I find FastStone Photo Resizer invaluable. I use it myself to fix up image libraries for clients before uploading, and I also give it to clients so that they can manage their own photos. It is very robust for a free program!

  59. shannon says

    September 3, 2009 at 7:43 pm

    I recommend trying http://contentcube.com . It is like visual FTP. You can have all your originals organized online and then share proofs or deliverables with your clients. The service automatically generates previews of PSD and AI files too. Great presentation tool as well.

  60. Andrew Larkin says

    September 4, 2009 at 3:45 am

    I use litmus & deviantart a lot! Looking forward to checking out the usability testing tool, thanks.

    Find firebug essential (surely everyone knows about it) but also use Rally (rallydev.com for project management) and LiveTimer (livetimer.com for time management).

    Andy

  61. kathryn barlow says

    September 4, 2009 at 2:59 pm

    Nice list! Great to have a good selection from each category too! Another option instead of FreshBooks is FreeAgent, which is a bit cheaper and I’ve heard great things about it.

  62. Jimmie says

    October 14, 2009 at 3:55 pm

    Here’s a great tool for online photo storage and online video storage.
    Zovue.com (http://www.zovue.com) is actually a social networking website that offers lots of unique features. I highly recommend that anyone storing photos or HD video online that they go and check it out.

  63. designchowk says

    November 1, 2009 at 10:44 am

    Wonderful articles wish to signup few of them mentioned above

  64. Genki says

    December 11, 2009 at 2:59 am

    Thanks for sharing
    now i got many new tools to use

    =)

  65. Shawn Adrian says

    January 9, 2010 at 3:39 pm

    An upcoming app that will make a good addition to the list is http://quoterobot.com.

  66. Issa says

    March 19, 2010 at 9:24 am

    Hi Jon,

    That’s a great sharing. I’m not much of a designer myself and I find your links useful. I will definitely look forward to reading more of your helpful information in the future. Cheers!

  67. Anupam Sen says

    July 14, 2010 at 1:24 am

    Amazing tools!
    Thanks 4 sharing

  68. Jim says

    September 6, 2010 at 11:50 am

    Thats a pretty comprehensive list of tools. Thanks for writing this article.

  69. Daniel Afrahim says

    November 18, 2010 at 5:40 am

    Great Post! Thank you.

  70. Father Time says

    December 9, 2010 at 8:52 am

    Another great time tracking and invoicing software is TSheets. Been using it for over a year now, no complaints, great customer service, and a rock solid product. What’s not to love?

  71. Patrick Hannigan says

    March 17, 2011 at 2:07 pm

    Check out Adobe Browser Lab (Free) for checking cross-browser compatibility… wicked interface and easy to use https://browserlab.adobe.com/

  72. Vincent says

    June 28, 2011 at 2:24 pm

    I would like to recommend OroTimesheet for time tracking and invoicing.
    It is really easy to use and very affordable.
    It helps me keep track of the time I spend on each project. I can easily create an invoice from my timesheets.

    It is free to try so make sure to visit the company’s website at http://www.orologic.com/

  73. John says

    May 12, 2019 at 3:02 am

    For free resources you can use these sources for textures, stock images, mockups

    http://www.textures4photoshop.com
    https://pixabay.com
    https://www.photoshopsupply.com

  74. wishsite says

    June 4, 2019 at 4:10 am

    For fast mockup creation inkscape is our choice.

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