Almost everyone reading this is in one of two situations.
Either you have not started yet, and every guide you have found assumes you already pay for four or five tools. Or you have started, you are paying somewhere between £30 and £150 a month, and the bill arrives faster than the results do.
Both are solved by the same thing, for different reasons. I use systeme.io for this — landing pages, email list, automation, checkout and a blog on one login, with a free plan that does not expire and does not ask for a card.
This post contains affiliate links. If you sign up through one I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. I use the platform myself and the free plan is what I recommend to almost everyone.
What do you actually need to start an online business?
Three things. Not five tools, not a website, not a brand.
- A page that asks for one thing — an email address, or a payment.
- Somewhere to keep the people who say yes, and email them.
- A rule that fires automatically when someone signs up, so the thing you promised actually arrives.
That is a working funnel. It takes an afternoon.
The reason people do not have one is almost never the software. It is that they try to build all three at once, or they build a website first and run out of momentum before they get to the part that earns anything.
What the free plan covers: 2,000 contacts, unlimited emails to them, three sales funnels, one blog, one online course, one custom domain, unlimited file storage, and 0% transaction fees on anything you sell. It is free forever, not a trial, and there is no card involved.
Two thousand contacts is well past the point where a list starts producing income, if it ever will. You will not outgrow it before it has paid for the upgrade.
If you would rather assemble it from separate free tools instead, these six cover most of what a new business does weekly — design, storage, forms, scheduling and analytics.
If you are already paying for something
Different problem. You are not deciding whether to start — you are deciding whether the bill is worth it.
There is one number that settles it: what is your list or your product earning per month? If it comfortably clears the subscription, keep paying and stop thinking about it. Your time is worth more than the saving.
If it earns nothing, or close to it, then you are paying to store contacts and to hold pages you could rebuild in an afternoon. That is a real cost with no return, and waiting does not fix it.
What people are usually paying for without noticing:
- A separate landing page tool, because the email platform does not build pages.
- A separate checkout, with a percentage coming off every sale.
- Design features — templates and drag-and-drop polish — which is what most paid plans lead with and the thing subscribers care about least. A plain email from a real person routinely outperforms a designed one.
For what the main platforms charge to bundle all that, here is the entry price of six of them side by side, and the fees that sit underneath the advertised number.
How to switch platforms without losing your list
The switch is smaller than it looks. Export your contacts before you cancel anything. Build the new version alongside the old one. Move the list, send one ordinary email to check it arrives, then cancel.
One month of overlap is a single payment; cancelling first can cost you the export entirely, because most platforms lock it behind the plan you just left. The full export process is here — worth doing today rather than when you need it.
If your setup runs to more than a couple of pages, systeme.io offers a done-for-you migration where their team moves what can be moved and rebuilds the rest. It is not included on every plan — it comes with the Unlimited tier at $97 a month, and with annual billing on the cheaper ones. The order that keeps your pages and your list intact is here, whether you do it yourself or not.
What it actually costs
Being straight about this, because vague claims about free plans are how people get caught out.
The software is free. Pages, emails, automations, checkout, file delivery, a blog. Nothing there is a trial and nothing expires.
Two things are not free. A domain, roughly £10 a year, if you want your own address. And a mailbox on that domain if you intend to send marketing email at volume — Gmail and Yahoo tightened their rules and shared sending addresses increasingly land in spam.
That is the honest total. Ten pounds a year and a mailbox, against several hundred for the usual stack.
The limits you will actually meet are the funnel and course counts — three funnels and one course — and the fact that automation on the free tier is basic rather than extensive. That covers a lead magnet, a product and a thank-you page comfortably. When you are running several offers at once you will feel it, and the step up is $17 a month, not a jump to the top tier.
Would you rather watch it built?
There is a free video course covering the whole platform — funnels, contacts, email sending, automation, digital products. No signup needed to watch. Video three builds a lead-generating funnel from nothing, which is the one most people want first.
Worth opening the account first and watching with the dashboard next to you. It is the difference between understanding it and having it built by the end of the video.
Start with one thing
Not the whole business. One page.
- Decide what you are giving away or selling. One thing, one problem.
- Build the page that asks for the email or the payment.
- Set the rule that delivers it automatically.
Improve it weekly after that. The people who never launch are the ones trying to get all three right before anything goes live.
If you have no audience yet and that is the part stopping you, this covers starting a list from zero followers.
Create your free accountFree forever · no credit card · nothing to cancel
Not ready to set anything up tonight? The free 30-page quickstart guide walks the whole build with screenshots of every step, so you can read it first and do it later. No cost, no upsell.
Common questions
Can you run an online business for free?
The software can be free. A domain is about £10 a year if you want your own address, and you pay card processing of roughly 2.9% plus 30¢ on each sale. There is no monthly platform fee unless you choose one.
Do you need a website to sell online?
No. You need a page with a URL, which is a smaller thing. A website invites browsing; a sales page asks for one decision. Most first sales happen on a single page with no site around it.
What is a sales funnel, in plain English?
A page that asks for one thing, plus whatever happens automatically after someone says yes. That is the whole idea. The word makes it sound like machinery; in practice it is a page and an email.
Should you build an email list before you have a product?
Usually yes. A list of people who chose to hear from you tells you what to build and gives you someone to sell it to. Building the product first and the audience second is the more common order and the harder one.
Is a free plan good enough to start a business on?
For a first offer, yes. The ceiling is three funnels, one course and 2,000 contacts — limits most people reach only once the business is earning enough to pay for the upgrade itself, which starts at $17 a month.
Related reading: the cheapest all-in-one plan takes 5% of every sale · how to sell digital products on Pinterest without a shop