Build a secure, affordable tech stack for your small business.
Independent guidance on choosing and configuring business software — without a full-time IT team. Written by an infrastructure engineer, for owners who became the IT person by accident. Every price here was read from the vendor's own page, and dated.
Choose your problem
Protect accounts & passwords
MFA, password managers and passkeys for teams without an IT person — with what each one costs at your headcount.
Back up business data
Why cloud storage is not a backup, what actually protects a Workspace or Microsoft 365 tenant, and what it costs.
Offboard an employee safely
An interactive runbook for shutting off every access point — sessions first, then passwords, in the order that matters.
Choose a CRM
Sized for 2–25 people, including which free tiers run out at two users and what the paid plan really costs.
Choose accounting software
What consultants and agencies actually need, priced at the headcount you have rather than at one user.
Cut your software bill
The six places to look for subscriptions you forgot, and the column most audits leave out.
What it actually costs
We track 28 plans across the categories a small business actually buys, each read from the vendor's own pricing page and re-checked weekly. Most published pricing is a headline rate; ours shows the cost at 1, 3, 5, 10 and 25 people, the seat minimums you pay for and cannot staff, the premium for billing monthly, and the headcount where a cheaper alternative takes over.
It also flags something almost nobody reports: 2 of those plans carry a rate the vendor itself calls introductory or time-limited, so the number everyone quotes is not the number you pay in year two. Last verification: .
Recent decisions, worked through
Which plan of a product to buy is usually the real question, and the vendor will not tell you the cheaper tier is enough.
1Password Teams Starter Pack vs Business: Which Plan to Buy
The Starter Pack covers 20 people, not 10. That changes the answer for almost every team under 21 — and makes the cliff much sharper when it comes.
Bitwarden Teams vs Enterprise: Is $2 More Per User Worth It?
Enterprise costs $24 more per user a year and includes a Families plan that retails at $47.88. For some teams that makes the dearer plan the cheaper one.
Google Workspace Starter vs Standard: Which One a Small Team Needs
The $7 gap buys 2 TB instead of 30 GB, and meeting recording. But both prices are introductory, and Google does not publish what comes next.
Microsoft 365 Business Basic vs Standard: What the Gap Buys
Storage and mailboxes are identical on both. You are paying 3.4× for desktop Office — and Microsoft no longer sells a Standard tier without Copilot.
Stacks by company size
Recommendations sized for the team you actually have — not the enterprise you aren't.
Why trust us
- Every claim carries its evidence class. Nothing is called “hands-on tested” until a documented lab run exists, and you can see exactly which runs have happened in the test log. Today's recommendations are documentation reviews and verified pricing — labelled as such. Read the methodology.
- Dated price checks, with the source. Every figure links to the vendor page it came from and the day we read it. When a price moves we publish the change.
- We publish our mistakes. When something we printed turns out to be wrong, it gets corrected in place with a date and listed on the corrections page — including the ones nobody noticed.
- Independence you can audit. We disclose every affiliate relationship per link, and we recommend products that pay us nothing when they are the right answer. Affiliate disclosure.
- No fear-mongering. No product makes you unhackable, and we will never tell you otherwise.