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As a freelance designer, there are tons of aspects of my business that I constantly need to juggle. As I’ve gone further into my business, I’ve found a few tried and true tools and resources that have helped me run everything smoothly. Read along to learn about my absolute favorite resources – both paid and free – that I couldn’t live without! (And maybe save a penny or two!)

1. Dubsado

First and foremost, I couldn’t run my business without the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool Dubsado. If you aren’t familiar, Dubsado focuses on managing your client projects with features like invoicing, sending forms, signing contracts, and organizing workflows. As you can imagine, these features are the backbone of running a freelance design business. Personally, I make the most use out of Dubsado with easily sending my clients invoices and questionnaire forms.

The best part? Dubsado lets you join for free! However, once you hit three client spots, you’ll need to upgrade to a paid subscription. But no worries – the subscriptions start at just $20 a month. I signed on for the $20 / month Starter subscription, and it’s been more than enough for my business.

You can use my code “designbykarlie” or click here to save 20% your first month or year!

2. Showit

If you’re a designer, you’ll fall head over heels for Showit – it’s my all-time favorite website designer software. You have complete creative freedom with no coding experience necessary! Showit perfectly balances having a wide array of heavy website design abilities, while still being incredibly easy to use. Trust me, anybody can learn to use Showit!

The basic plan starts at just $24 a month – with the ability to create an unlimited amount of websites designs (only one being assigned your domain, of course). And if you need to add a blog, easy peasy! Showit holds your hand the entire way with phenomenal customer service, and the subscription is just $5 more.

You can use my code “designbykarlie” or click here to get your first month for free!

3. Tailwind

Almost every designer out there knows the power of Pinterest – it can easily become the number one traffic driver to your website or blog. If you’re getting serious about launching your Pinterest profile, you need to consider Tailwind. It’s a content scheduling tool designed to grow your Pinterest audience and website traffic. Depending on your subscription, you can schedule an entire month’s worth of content in just a couple hours!

And guess what? You can join Tailwind for completely free and schedule up to 20 posts per month! Need a little more wiggle room? Luckily, their next plan up costs just $9.99 monthly and includes 100 scheduled posts per month.

Click here to earn a $15 credit on your subscription!

4. Asana

I would say that Asana is second in line when it comes to the most important tools I use to run my business. Every single one of my client projects is run and organized through Asana. There’s so much I can say about this tool, that I’ll have to dedicate an entire post to it in the future. But for now, here’s a few of my favorite features:

• You can create templates and use them to start every new client project
• You can easily organize your projects by sections and tasks so your client can easily digest all of the content
• For each task, you can assign the member responsible, mark it complete when it’s finished, and even post feedback in the comments underneath.

Luckily, Asana plans start for free and come with a long length of advanced features. If you need a little more perks, the next subscription comes at just $10.99 a month!

5. Coolers

This one’s for my designer friends out there – Coolors! No more racking your brain trying to come up with the perfect color scheme for your next client project. This website has plenty of color schemes to get inspiration from, and even has a color palette generator for you to create your own! I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve spent hitting the spacebar, sifting through color palette after color palette.

The best thing about Coolors is that it’s completely free to use! If you are looking to remove ads and get a couple added perks, you can upgrade to Pro for a mere $3 a month.

Click here to sign up!

6. Adobe

This one might be a tad obvious, but for those of you who are new to the design world, Adobe is where it’s at! Almost every designer and creative uses Adobe softwares to create their work, and there’s a reason. Adobe products are considered the best design softwares on the market! Personally, I use Illustrator, Photoshop, and Lightroom just about every day in my business, but there are loads more!

With all its power, a subscription to an Adobe plan can be a little more on the pricier side. While individual software subscriptions start at around $20.99 / month, you can also subscribe to their Creative Cloud All Apps plan to get access to over 20 of their products for $54.99 / month. That’s a huge bargain!

Click here to sign up!

All in all

The thought of running a business can be intimidating – there’s a lot of information out there! Hopefully this list can add a little bit of clarity to your decision making. Trust me, I use each of these tools every single day and love them! Feel free to ask any questions down in the comments, and let me know if I helped you save a penny or two!