3 Essential Small Business Tools Below $50 (With Use Cases)
By Max Lin
AppSumo’s philosophy has always been to give you high-value, low-cost tools to boost your business. To quote Chief Sumo Noah Kagan, “I hate paying full price for anything—but especially for software. I never wanted to buy a subscription product again, so I created AppSumo 12 years ago.”
From September 19 to September 23, we’re getting back to basics with The $49ers Collection, a celebration of what we do best: lifetime deals at low prices. This collection features epic $49 tools to help you make BIG money for your business, help you save time, and boost your productivity like never before.
Tons of our customers have seen incredible results from the tools in our $49ers Collection, so we decided to talk to them firsthand.
Want to find out how people are using these awesome tools—and what kind of success they’ve seen?
Let’s dive in.
1. MeetGeek
MeetGeek is an AI meeting assistant that lets you record, take notes, and share call highlights, so you can maximize the effectiveness of your online meetings.
Alternative to: Otter.ai, Fathom, and Fireflies.ai
Customer use case
Richard Foleher is the owner of Everything Voice Ltd, which provides telecommunications solutions in the UK. The company helps businesses boost connectivity for a “more agile, more mobile, more ‘work anywhere’ type of ethos.’ MeetGeek completely changed the way Richard worked.
As you might imagine, Richard and his team conduct a lot of remote meetings. MeetGeek’s AI meeting assistant transcribes the important stuff so Richard’s team can focus on having high-quality conversations.
Normally, a team member would have to manually take notes. Richard says that thanks to MeetGeek, “10 to 15 minutes later, we’ve got a full transcription of the meeting with who said what. That’s very, very valuable to me because quite often a lot of my conversations are very technical.” (MeetGeek even gave us a transcript of our call with Richard to use for this post. Talk about full circle.)
Plus, Richard likes the ability to measure participant engagement during meetings. The seamless Outlook integration doesn’t hurt either, with meetings automatically synced and transcripts emailed to participants after.
Results they’ve seen
MeetGeek has given Richard hundreds of hours a month back, allowing him to focus more on what matters: his customers. “It saved me a lot of time because I’m not having to constantly remind myself, ‘What did we say we were going to do?’ or ‘What did so-and-so say they were going to do?’”
The tool alleviates the burden of having to remember important details for both Richard and his clients. By the end of each call, both parties have an accurate transcript they can point to. That way, everyone’s on the same page and nothing gets lost in translation.
Richard paid $59 for lifetime access to MeetGeek and says “in the very first transcription, it saved me more than $60 in time.”
2. Snackeet
Snackeet is a web story builder that lets you design interactive landing pages to engage your audience, collect leads, and launch surveys.
Alternative to: VideoAsk, Typeform, and Apester
Customer use case
Earl Williams is the owner of ESW Perfume Bar, a company that makes unique fragrances customized to the individual. At the company’s in-person events, “guests can design and create their own custom fragrance. It’s a great way to have fun and make a unique gift.”
Oftentimes, Earl found that people needed more guidance during events. Most folks had trouble picking the right fragrance on the spot. Enter Snackeet.
With Snackeet and its conditional logic, Earl was able to create a “scent finder” quiz to help people land on their perfect perfume. He got the PWA (progressive web app) on a tablet for in-person users and the scent-finding experience was ready to go.
Results they’ve seen
Snackeet is an engagement-boosting powerhouse, and Earl saw his paid customers double since building his lead gen quiz using the tool.
At in-person pop-up and vendor events, it’s no easy feat to catch a visitor’s eyes, especially when you’re competing with popular (see: food) vendors. Snackeet helped Earl get increased attention and engagement, creating buzz and even long-time relationships. While some purchased on the spot, others went on to book his company for private events. Plus, if they really loved their individualized scent, there was only one place they could return to for more: ESW Perfume Bar.
3. BasicOps
BasicOps is a project management solution that helps you prioritize tasks and communicate with your team in real time.
Alternative to: Asana, Trello, and Monday.com
Customer use case
Marc Coty is an account manager and media buyer at Grounds for Promotion, a boutique digital marketing agency. When Marc first joined, the team lived in the world of spreadsheets when it came to task management.
For this small company, it meant a lot of extra organizational labor. “There’s a lot of unnecessary manual work that goes into updating a spreadsheet rather than just quickly entering and completing tasks like we’re doing with BasicOps now,” says Marc.
BasicOps makes task management a breeze for Marc, with automatic recurring tasks that have helped him let go of manual calendar reminders. For example, when conducting creative tests on ads, Marc gets notifications to follow up on changes he’s made to see how they’re performing. It’s a painless way to make sure things don’t fall through the cracks.
Marc also likes the subtask feature which allows him to break big projects like “launch Google ads for a client” down into manageable components: set the budget, create ad copy, and so on.
Results they’ve seen
Thanks to BasicOps, Marc’s seen an overall change in the way his team stays organized and productive.
With tasks and subtasks, he can now get a birds-eye view of exactly what needs to be done—checking email and BasicOps first thing in the morning have become second nature for him. Marc saves a couple of hours per week with the tool and gets to put project management on autopilot.
“That’s maybe the core of who’s going to benefit the most is people who are on a more manual process. With AppSumo, they’re able to get it for a one-time fee and that cost quickly gets absorbed. You become reliant on BasicOps and realize how much time you’re saving with it.”
More buzz about our $49ers
Our $49ers tools are customer favorites back for a limited time only! Here are some real customer reviews about other all-star products in the collection.
gini
gini instantly generates investor-ready financial models, reports, and scenario plans, so you can manage cash flow like a pro.
“A great way to get the info I needed to manage cash flow. gini helped us take control of our finances without the need to wait to speak to my accounting resource to obtain the information.”
– Olivia Cotes-James, Founder of LUÜNA
Oviond
Oviond is a customizable digital platform that combines and organizes all of your marketing data into useful insights and automated reports.
“After purchasing one code, I quickly purchased another: that’s how much I enjoyed Oviond.
Setting up a client and connecting data only takes three minutes, and setting up dashboards and reports is made simple by the pre-existing templates (there are lots), which I then fine-tune to my client’s needs. I’ve had the product for 2 days, I’ve set up 6 clients on it with multiple dashboards and automated reports, and I am only getting praise about how fun and well presented the reports are.”
– Ann Balmier
SpeedPPC
SpeedPPC is a pay-per-click campaign builder that helps you create hyper-targeted ad campaigns that actually convert.
“I just onboarded a Google Ads client even though I’m not super experienced with Google Ads but I took the challenge because I wanted to use SpeedPPC and…
The client is blown away, therefore so am I!
Creating granular campaigns is super easy and it has saved me tens of hours already.”
– Chris Lourenco | Google Ads and Social Media Specialist