Want to lower your bills fast for your business online and need to cut expenses with open source alternatives? In times of uncertainty, a lot of businesses are looking for ways to lower costs by transitioning to free or low-cost software.
In this guide, we’ve put together a list of great open source alternatives to help you reduce SaaS bills for your small business.
Here’s a table of contents of our picks for open source products to help you navigate this post:
What Is Cost Cutting Strategy?
A cost cutting strategy is a process that businesses can use to help reduce their costs in an effort to increase their profits. This helps to grow your returns and profits in the long run. And it can be especially helpful if your profits are down during times of global economic hardship.
So it depends on your services and products, but each company can have a slightly different cost cutting strategy.
But for small businesses operating all or part of their businesses online, there are a lot of common tools that can possibly be cut to reduce SaaS bills.
Ways to Reduce SaaS Bills
If you’re asking yourself how to reduce expenses and save money with open source alternatives to SaaS bills, this list should help get you started. These are all powerful open-source tools that are free or low-cost to use.
1. Use a Low-Cost Form Builder like WPForms
Some form builders aren’t incredibly price-friendly for small businesses. Luckily, WPForms is an affordable alternative to expensive software like Typeform, and the Lite version on WordPress.org is also open source.
This solid form builder can help your business save money in the long run, with these powerful features all offered in WPForms Pro:
- Pre-built form templates to make it even easier to create contact forms, so you never have to start from scratch
- It’s 100% responsive so your forms look fantastic on all devices
- An amazingly easy drag-and-drop interface to build your forms
- Use reCAPTCHA, Honeypot, and custom captcha to prevent spam submissions on your web form
- Multi-step forms to help improve your form conversion rate and profits
- Smart conditional logic to show or hide form fields based on previous answers
- Geolocation to show where you users are located
- Make more money by collecting payments on your website using Stripe and PayPal
- A form abandonment feature that lets you grab an email address from a form even if visitors don’t finish
- Surveys and Polls that let you capture data from visitors and check out the results right on your WordPress dashboard
- Build contact forms with AJAX so your webpages don’t reload on form submission, and users stay on the page
- And more…
Click Here to Get Started With WPForms Pro Now
2. Switch to WordPress.org
If you’re using a website builder that has it’s own hosting platform such as Weebly or WordPress.com, you’ll surely want to switch over to WordPress.org. The easiest way to do this is through Bluehost. WordPress.org is open source and can be set up to be self-hosted with Bluehost. It’s the most popular Content Management System (CMS) out there.
Here are some reasons people benefit by using WordPress.org for their websites:
- It powers and is trusted by over 1/3 of all websites
- Compatible with the best drag and drop website builders
- Freedom to install WordPress plugins and WordPress themes to customize the functionality and look of your site
- Used and loved by some huge companies (and if you want to know what your favorite brands use, try entering their web address into isitwp.com)
The WordPress.org platform on it’s own is free. But you need somewhere to install it where it lives on the internet.
Which means you’ll need to buy your domain name and hosting — we recommend Bluehost. You can get started for just $2.75/month which includes a free domain.
Click here to get started with WordPress on Bluehost.
3. Install MonsterInsights
MonsterInsights is an easy-to-use Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. In times where you are trying to reduce SaaS bills, using data-powered decisions to grow your business for free is an incredibly smart thing to do. Here’s what MonsterInsights can do and why it’s on our list:
- Smart universal tracking makes sure that if your site visitors switch from a mobile device to a desktop, you’ll still get accurate data
- You can see real-time stats in an easy-to-read report found right on your WordPress dashboard
- Easy to use so you can setup WordPress analytics and start seeing insights in under 15 minutes without even needing to learn how to code
- The premium version lets you track eCommerce statistics, traffic sources, advertisements efforts, and more
- A behavior report that shows you exactly how people find your website
Click here to get started with MonsterInsights.
4. Utilize TrustPulse
With TrustPulse, you can use FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) as a great psychological tool to drive more sales and conversions on your site through social proof. The free version can help you get more sales without dipping into your small business marketing budget.
- You can easily customize your notifications to match your brand by changing colors, messages, and images
- Display a live stream of recent activity like registrations, purchases, email sign ups, etc that shows what actions people are taking on your site
- Includes an easy-to-use visual builder so even beginners can use it
- Set up a default notification to use during periods where you don’t have any live activity to stream and display so there’s always something to show
TrustPulse works especially great on eCommerce websites like WooCommerce, which also happens to be open-source.
Click here to get started with TrustPulse.
5. Try WooCommerce
WooCommerce is a free platform for people to sell products online, and it’s the most popular one out there. If you’re selling things and want to optimize your eCommerce efforts, this is the tool for you.
- There’s tons of flexibility with this online shop creator because it gives you complete control over the design and functionality of your website if you’re on WordPress.org
- Offers a wide range of shipping options such as free shipping or shipping that’s calculated in real-time, with helpful WooCommerce plugins
- You own all of it so you never have to worry about a 3rd-party platform taking your store’s data
- Grow profits by using live sales notifications for WooCommerce to skyrocket your income online while reducing SaaS costs
And if you’re not ready to launch your online shop because you’re just setting things up, check out the best coming soon WordPress plugins and themes to start ranking right away.
6. Install the Astra Theme
Astra is an open-source WordPress theme that makes so much sense to use if you’re on a budget. That’s because it makes it so easy to build your own site, without needing to hire and pay for a developer. Here are some highlights of this amazing theme:
- Has tons of customizable options
- Modern ready-to-go web designs to make your website look professional
- Works with visual page builders
- SEO-Friendly
- 100% open source and developed transparently on GitHub
Having a WordPress theme that’s reliable and lightning-fast like Astra is a great way to impress all your potential customers and get those leads you’ll need to increase profits during cost cutting times.
7. Try BuddyPress
BuddyPress is the ultimate community building, open source tool. Instead of spending money on social media management software, this free alternative will easily help you reduce SaaS bills and keep your business profitable. Some of BuddyPress’ best features include:
- Encourages massive engagement between and from your social media followers
- Allows people to create user profiles
- You can generate groups
- Includes activity streams you can show to users
- Engage people further with notifications
And because it’s open source and there have been a ton of awesome volunteers working on it, you can get BuddyPress in multiple languages. This is great if you’re trying to make your website multilingual.
8. Use OpenOffice
OpenOffice is a good, free, open source alternative to Microsoft Office subscriptions if you’re trying to reduce SaaS bills. Some of the features in this popular software include:
- Completely open source and always free
- Offered on more platforms than just Mac and PC, including Linux, BSD, Solaris, OS/2, etc
- Includes tools like a word processor, spreadsheets, database, presentation editor, vector drawing tool, and a formula editor
- Ability to read and write files in Microsoft formats
With its entire office productivity software suite at your fingertips for free, OpenOffice is a great option for lowering business costs.
Final Thoughts
And there they are! The world’s best open source alternatives to help you reduce SaaS bills and save your business website money online.
So what are you waiting for? Get started with the most powerful WordPress forms plugin today. WPForms Pro offers a 14-day money-back guarantee.
You might also be interested in making sure you’re up to speed on the most effective small business marketing ideas out there.
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