Free and very cheap tools for a full featured landing page. $19 / year + domain price
Hi All
I was making my first real landing page for AI Feedback Pro - a coming micro-SaaS on automated feedback analysis for Product Managers and Customer Success specialists. My budget was "as small as possible, preferably all free" and it happened to be not so easy to find the whole set of tools you need if you are on a tight budget.
What works well for free or very cheap
So I thought I'd share a list of good tools that work well for the landing pages. Some reasoning and details are in a longer blog post, here's just the final list for easy reference:
Where the price isn’t mentioned - it is free on the landing page scale
- Landing page service: Carrd on Pro Standard plan for $19/year, can be used for 10 sites
- Runner-up: EarlyBird.im for $8/month
- Theme: Carrd’s own template #95 free for Pro Plan users
- Runners-up: template #106 also free and SaaSy template for $29
- Mailing list to subscribe interested people: EmailOctopus
- Cookieless Analytics: PanelBear for your first users, GoatCounter not too loose the track if landing page is suddenly successful
- Runners-up: Clicky and Counter.dev
- Surveys: Tally.so
- Illustrations: Undraw + some PlaygroundAI modifications when you want to have something similar, but a little different
- Runners-up: just google for “undraw alternatives” - there are lots of illustration services free for commercial use
- Logo: Namecheap LogoMaker
- Runners-up: LogoAI for inspiration if you are fine with recreating it in SVG, BrandCrowd for $8 or TailorBrands for 8€
- Email service: Gandi, but you’ll need to buy domain from them in order to get it for free
- Support chat: Crisp chat
- Bonus: Your service name: ChatGPT as a discussion partner
What do you think? Which service is missing?
What's your toolbox for the landing pages? Have I missed any other services that I should consider?
P.S.
Particularly big thanks to @calebsylvest for the feedback on my landing page and to @dearroy for drawing my attention to EarlyBird.im. It is quite a decent product and be I am less budget-constrained, quite non-zero chances are I'd go for EarlyBird to get many things not cheaper, but sooner.
I'm trying framer and it's pretty awesome as a builder.
We appreciate you trying out EarlyBird! It is still in its early stages (after all it's launched 1 months ago), and we are actively working on it.
If you have any ideas on how we can improve it, we are all ears!
@dearroy, I think EarlyBird is a great start and indeed it is more convenient than Carrd for simple small SaaS pages (more optimized template for quick start, built-in analytics and lead capturing, some easier integrations). I even made the first draft of AIFeedback.pro in EarlyBird and was moving it to Carrd later.
For me personally the issues were just two: inability to inject my favorite cookieless analytics/javascript (that IIRC you've implemented lately with custom embeds) and price. $19 a year reusable for 9 more sites VS almost $100 a year for 5 sites AND a limit on signups is too big of a difference for me even if EarlyBird looks nicer and is more integrated.
But hey, that's me on the tiny budget, there can very well be many people eager to pay a bit more for the convenience and "integrationness" of EarlyBird. Good luck with the development!
P.S.
And since price was so big blocker for me, I didn't really study if EarlyBird adds any cookies to the visitors browsers. If it does, that'd be another blocker - for the landing page I don't want to mess with the cookie banners, GDPR and what not just to get a bit more analytics precision. It's not a permanent use site anyways.
Carrd is the way to go! I've built loads of landings with Carrd. Simple and cheap
Great post, I’m interested in exactly this to start throwing up cheap landing pages to test some ideas.
I’m curious if you found anything that was a bit more expensive, but provided value you thought might be worth it. Maybe something that bundled a few of these things together?
Options that I found I've mentioned in the post (and with a bit more details in the blog post), yet my focus was way more on the "cheap" side, rather than on full featured side.
From what I saw EarlyBird by @dearroy is somewhat more integrated (I think they can capture leads for you, provide landing-specific anaytics and relatively easily integrate with several other apps such as Crisp.chat), but they are still in rather initial development (custom embeds were made possible just last week IIRC) and with almost $100/year for one site to me it was prohibitively expensive compared to Carrd's $19/year reusable for 9 more sites. That said I actually did start prototyping my Landing in EarlyBird - it was easier. So if you are less cost conscious, it could be an option for you.
Then it also depends on your style of doing things. If you are into throwing in many landing pages, then it could possibly make sense to go through the suffering of arranging everything once and then just clone the situation within a couple of hours for the each next page. If I go for the next project, I'll probably use the very same services for the very same price again except Carrd won't need a second payment anymore.