Why we gave five tools away instead of buying ads

Here's a problem every small software business has and almost none of them solve.

You say you build good websites. So does everyone else. The prospective customer has no way of telling the difference, so they fall back on the only thing they can compare: price. Which is a race you win by being worst.

The usual answer is a portfolio — three client logos and some screenshots. Nobody believes it, because everybody has one.

So we tried something else.

The idea

Build genuinely useful software. Give it away. No sign-up, no email harvesting, no "enter your details to see your results". Just the thing, working, free.

Then when somebody asks whether we can build them a website, the answer isn't a claim. It's go and use the calculator, then decide.

What we built

Five, so far.

• Are you charging enough? — works out the day rate a trade actually needs, once holidays, costs and unbillable days come off
• Chase an unpaid invoice — the statutory interest and compensation a late-paying business owes you, plus the letter
• Scottish business rates calculator — poundage and Small Business Bonus relief, using Scotland's rules rather than England's
• Is your website costing you jobs? — how fast your site really loads on a phone
• Highland Hike Planner — the one that isn't for business at all

The rules we set ourselves

No email wall. The moment you ask for an address before showing a result, it stops being a gift and becomes a trade. People can tell.

Genuinely correct, not roughly right. The rates calculator uses the actual 2026 Scottish poundage and the real Small Business Bonus taper, because a calculator that's approximately right about someone's money is worse than none.

Say when it's not our field. The late payment tool states plainly that it isn't legal advice and that a big or disputed debt needs a solicitor. That costs us nothing and it's true.

What it's really for

Three things, in order of how much they matter.

Proof. Anyone can claim to build software. Fewer can point at five working things and say have a go.

Something to give. In a small place, being useful before you're paid is how you become the name people mention. That isn't a strategy so much as how it works round here.

Finding out what people need. Every tool started as something we'd watched a business do badly by hand. That's the same instinct as the automation work — the tools are just the version we could give away.

The part that's uncomfortable

Giving things away only works if they're good. A half-finished free tool is worse than no free tool, because now you've proved something you didn't intend to.

We found a real error in one of them during testing — the letter template used column alignment that would have looked mangled pasted into most email programs. Not a disaster, but the sort of thing that undermines the whole point. It got fixed before anyone saw it, which is only because we went looking.

If you're going to use free tools as your evidence, they have to survive being examined by someone who doesn't already like you.

Would we do it again

Ask us in a year — and we'll tell you honestly, with real numbers.

Each tool now counts genuine uses, and we show the figure once it's worth showing. Not a made-up starting number, and not a total inflated by page views. When we write the follow-up to this post, the numbers in it will be the real ones, including if the answer turns out to be "not many".

That's the whole point, really. It's easy to claim you're the honest option. It's slightly harder to build things that make it checkable.

---

All five are free and always will be. Have a look — no sign-up, no email, no catch.