Every marketing budget conversation eventually hits the same wall: software costs. CRM, email platform, analytics, social scheduler, design tool, SEO suite, project management. Stack them up and you’re looking at $1,500–3,000 per month before you’ve spent a dollar on actual campaigns.
We run AlsheikhMedia’s entire marketing operation on a $0 software budget. Not because we’re cheap — because we wanted to prove it could be done, and because every dollar saved on tools is a dollar available for the work that actually matters: creating content worth reading.
This isn’t a listicle of “50 free tools you should try.” It’s the exact stack we use, why we chose each tool, and what tradeoffs we accepted. Some of these choices are unconventional. None of them are compromises.
The Stack at a Glance
| Category | Tool | What We Use It For |
|---|---|---|
| Website & CMS | Astro + Markdown | Bilingual blog, landing pages |
| Hosting & CDN | Cloudflare Pages | Global edge delivery, SSL, analytics |
| CI/CD | GitHub Actions | Automated builds, link checking, deploys |
| Analytics | Cloudflare Web Analytics | Privacy-first traffic data |
| Mailchimp (free tier) | RSS-to-email digest | |
| Social distribution | dlvr.it (free tier) | RSS-to-social auto-posting |
| SEO research | Google Search Console | Keyword data, indexing, performance |
| Design | Canva (free tier) | Blog images, social cards |
| Writing & editing | Google Docs | Collaborative drafts, commenting |
| Project management | GitHub Issues | Editorial calendar, task tracking |
Total monthly cost: $0.
Website: Astro + Markdown Files
Most companies start their marketing stack decision with “which CMS should we use?” WordPress, Webflow, Ghost, Contentful — each comes with hosting costs, plugin subscriptions, and maintenance overhead.
We skipped the question entirely. Our blog posts are Markdown files in a Git repository. Our framework is Astro, which compiles those files into static HTML at build time. The output is plain HTML and CSS — no server, no database, no runtime.
This sounds like a developer’s choice, not a marketer’s. But consider what you get:
Zero hosting cost. Static files are free to host on Cloudflare Pages, Netlify, Vercel, and GitHub Pages. We use Cloudflare Pages. Our site is served from edge nodes in 300+ cities worldwide. The free tier has no bandwidth limits.
Zero CMS cost. Markdown is the CMS. Any text editor works. Version history comes from Git. Collaboration happens through pull requests. There’s no admin panel to secure, no plugins to update, no database to back up.
Zero performance cost. Our pages load in under 1 second on a 3G connection. No JavaScript framework runs in the browser. Google’s Core Web Vitals are green across the board. This isn’t optimization — it’s the default behavior of static HTML.
The tradeoff? Non-technical team members can’t edit content through a web interface. For a two-person marketing team where both people can write Markdown, this isn’t a tradeoff. For a team with non-technical contributors, you’d add a Git-based CMS like TinaCMS or CloudCannon — still free or near-free.
Hosting: Cloudflare Pages
Cloudflare Pages gives you:
- Unlimited bandwidth (no overage charges, ever)
- Automatic SSL certificates
- Global CDN with 300+ edge locations
- Preview deployments for every pull request
- Built-in Web Analytics (privacy-first, no cookies)
The free tier supports unlimited sites, unlimited requests, and 500 builds per month. We deploy twice a week (Tuesday and Thursday blog posts) plus occasional site updates. We’ve never come close to the build limit.
Compare this to a typical WordPress setup: shared hosting ($10–30/month), SSL certificate (often included now, but not always), CDN ($20+/month for CloudFront or similar), and a caching plugin to make it all tolerable. You’re spending $30–50/month just to match what Cloudflare Pages gives you for free.
CI/CD: GitHub Actions
Every push to our main branch triggers an automated pipeline:
- Install dependencies
- Build the Astro site
- Run internal link checks (catch broken links before they go live)
- Deploy to Cloudflare Pages
GitHub Actions gives you 2,000 minutes per month on the free tier. Our build takes about 45 seconds. At 8–10 deploys per month, we use roughly 8 minutes. That’s 0.4% of our free allocation.
The link checker is worth highlighting. We wrote a small script that crawls the built site and verifies every internal link resolves to an actual page. It catches the number one blog maintenance problem — broken links from renamed or deleted pages — before the site goes live. Total cost of this quality gate: $0.
Analytics: Cloudflare Web Analytics
Google Analytics is free, but it’s not really free. You’re paying with your visitors’ privacy, your site’s performance (the GA4 gtag.js script weighs roughly 134 KB compressed), and your time managing cookie consent banners to comply with GDPR.
Cloudflare Web Analytics is genuinely free. It’s built into Cloudflare Pages — a lightweight beacon is automatically injected, no manual setup needed. It measures traffic without requiring cookies. It doesn’t track individual users. It tells you what you actually need to know: which pages get traffic, where visitors come from, and what devices they use.
What you give up: no conversion funnels, no event tracking, no user flow visualization. For a content marketing operation where the primary metric is “are people reading our articles,” this is everything we need. If you need event tracking, Plausible ($9/month) or Umami (free, self-hosted) are privacy-respecting alternatives.
Email: Mailchimp Free Tier
Mailchimp’s free plan supports up to 250 contacts and 500 sends per month. For a blog that publishes twice a week, an RSS-to-email digest is the obvious play: subscribers automatically get a roundup of new posts.
The setup takes 15 minutes. You point Mailchimp at your RSS feed, design a template, set the frequency, and forget about it. No manual sends, no campaign creation, no “should we send this week?” decisions. If you published, it sends. If you didn’t, it doesn’t.
At 250 contacts, you’re in very-early-stage territory. That’s fine. By the time you outgrow 250 subscribers, you’ll have enough data to know whether email is driving real business results — and whether it’s worth paying for.
Alternative: Buttondown is free for the first 100 subscribers with a cleaner interface. Substack is free forever but takes ownership of your audience relationship. We chose Mailchimp because the RSS automation is reliable and the free tier gets us started.
Social Distribution: dlvr.it Free Tier
The worst marketing time sink is manually posting blog links to social media. You write the post, you craft the tweet, you adjust for LinkedIn’s format, you schedule it, you forget to post it to the second platform. Every week.
dlvr.it connects to your RSS feed and automatically posts new articles to X (Twitter) and LinkedIn. The free tier supports 3 RSS feeds and 5 posts per day. With our Tuesday/Thursday publishing schedule, we use 2 of those 5 daily posts.
The auto-generated post includes the article title, link, and featured image. It’s not as polished as a hand-crafted social post, but it guarantees every article gets distributed to every channel within minutes of publication. Consistent distribution beats perfect distribution.
For more sophisticated social scheduling (carousels, threads, custom copy per platform), Buffer’s free tier gives you 3 channels and 10 scheduled posts. We use dlvr.it for the automated baseline and supplement with manual posts for high-priority articles.
SEO: Google Search Console
The best SEO tool is free and made by the only company whose opinion actually matters: Google.
Search Console tells you:
- Which queries bring people to your site
- Your average position for each query
- Click-through rates by page
- Indexing status and errors
- Core Web Vitals scores
- Mobile usability issues
Paid SEO tools like Ahrefs (from $29/month Starter), SEMrush ($140/month Pro), or Moz ($49/month Starter) add competitor analysis, backlink tracking, and keyword difficulty scores. These are useful for established sites competing in crowded niches. For a blog in its first year, Search Console gives you everything you need to understand what’s working and what isn’t.
Our workflow: check Search Console weekly. Look at which pages are gaining impressions. Look at which queries we rank for that we didn’t target. Write more content around what’s already working. This simple feedback loop has driven more traffic growth than any paid tool could.
Supplement with: Google Trends (free) for topic validation, AnswerThePublic (limited free searches) for question-based keyword ideas, and AlsoAsked (3 free searches per day) for related question clusters.
Design: Canva Free Tier
Every blog post needs a featured image. Every social post needs a visual. Canva’s free tier includes thousands of templates, stock photos, and design elements.
Our blog image workflow: start from a template sized for our blog’s featured image dimensions, swap in relevant stock imagery, add our brand colors, export as compressed JPEG. Time per image: 5–10 minutes.
What you give up on the free tier: brand kit (consistent fonts and colors across designs), background remover, resize to multiple formats. These are nice-to-haves, not necessities. We keep a simple style guide document that anyone can reference.
Alternative: Figma’s free tier is more powerful for custom design work but has a steeper learning curve. For blog images and social cards, Canva’s template-first approach is faster.
Writing: Google Docs
Every draft starts in Google Docs. Not because it’s the best writing tool — because it’s the best commenting tool.
The editorial workflow: writer creates a draft, shares with the reviewer, reviewer leaves inline comments, writer resolves comments and finalizes. Version history is automatic. No files to email back and forth, no “which version is the latest” confusion.
For a bilingual operation like ours (English and Arabic), Google Docs handles RTL text natively. The Arabic writer works in the same tool with the same commenting workflow. When the draft is approved, we copy the content into Markdown files for the site.
Alternative: Notion (free for individuals, $8+/month for teams) combines writing with project management. HackMD (free) supports Markdown natively if you prefer to write in the format you’ll publish in.
Project Management: GitHub Issues
If your code lives on GitHub, your editorial calendar can too. GitHub Issues gives you:
- Issue per blog post (title includes publish date)
- Labels for status (draft, review, approved, published)
- Milestones for weekly or monthly content goals
- Assignment to team members
- Comment threads for feedback and approvals
We create one issue per blog post with a checklist: draft EN, draft AR, CMO review, board approval, publish. The issue tracks the full lifecycle from idea to live page. When the post goes live, the issue closes.
This only works if your team already lives in GitHub. If they don’t, Trello (free tier: unlimited cards, 10 boards) or Linear (free for small teams) are better editorial calendar tools.
What This Stack Can’t Do
Transparency matters more than salesmanship. Here’s what our $0 stack doesn’t cover:
Paid advertising. Google Ads, Meta Ads, and LinkedIn Ads cost money by definition. No free tool replaces ad spend. Our approach: invest in organic content first, prove demand, then amplify winners with paid spend.
Advanced email automation. Drip campaigns, behavioral triggers, lead scoring — these require paid email platforms (Kit, formerly ConvertKit, at $33/month; ActiveCampaign at $15/month Starter). Our workaround: the RSS digest handles distribution; we’ll add automation when we have enough subscribers to justify the cost.
Competitor intelligence. SimilarWeb, SpyFu, and Ahrefs’ competitor analysis features cost money. Our workaround: read competitors’ blogs, follow them on social, and focus on writing better content rather than reverse-engineering their strategy.
Video production. This is the one category where free tools have real limitations. DaVinci Resolve (free) is professional-grade but requires serious hardware and learning investment. CapCut (free) is good for short-form. For our AI video editing workflow, some tools require paid tiers for production use.
The Philosophy Behind $0
Running a zero-cost stack isn’t about being frugal. It’s about clarity.
When you remove tool costs from the equation, you’re left with the only question that matters: is the content good enough to earn attention? No tool fixes bad content. No analytics dashboard reveals why nobody shared your article. No email platform compensates for a boring subject line.
The constraint also forces better decisions. When you can’t buy your way to more distribution, you write things worth sharing. When you can’t A/B test 47 variations, you develop taste. When you can’t hire an agency, you learn the craft yourself.
Not every company should run a $0 stack. If you have budget and your bottleneck is execution speed, paid tools absolutely help. But if you’re starting from zero, or if you’re questioning whether your $2,000/month tool spend is driving proportional results, try this: cancel everything for one month. Use only free tools. See what actually breaks.
You might be surprised how little does.
This is part of our ongoing series on building AlsheikhMedia’s marketing operation from scratch. See also: The Arabic Content Gap and Digital Sustainability.
