Softwarecomparison
Accounting Software for Small Businesses: An Honest Comparison
What Xero, QuickBooks, FreshBooks and a spreadsheet each really cost once you add users, payroll and your bookkeeper's time.
11 min read
For owners, operators and independent professionals
The spending decisions nobody explains to a small business owner
What a website quote should actually contain. What a click is worth before you set a Google Ads budget. What accounting software costs once payroll and your bookkeeper's time are in the total. What your own hour has to earn.
Start here
Websitesguide
How Much Should a Small Business Website Cost in 2026?
Real price bands, what drives them, and the line items worth paying for versus the ones quietly padding quotes.
12 min read
Marketingguide
Setting a Google Ads Budget That Isn't a Guess
How to work backwards from your average job value to a daily budget, and what to do in the first 30 days.
11 min read
Operationsguide
How to Set an Hourly Rate You Can Defend
The billable-hours arithmetic most freelancers get wrong, and how to price from target income instead of guesswork.
10 min read
Business Technologyguide
Cybersecurity for Businesses Without an IT Department
Seven measures that stop the attacks small businesses actually experience, in the order worth doing them.
10 min read
Do the sums first
Five calculators that run in your browser. Nothing you type leaves the page, and none of them ask for an email address.
- Website Cost Estimator
Sanity-check a website quote
- Google Ads Budget Calculator
Work out an affordable click cost
- Profit Margin Calculator
Margin, markup and the price you need
- Break-Even Calculator
The revenue where you stop losing money
- Hourly Rate Calculator
Price from target income, not guesswork
Every section, in full
Software
Tools that earn their monthly fee
Websites
What a site should cost and do
Marketing
Spend that can be measured
Operations
Pricing, cash flow and process
Where the numbers come from
Prices are taken from vendors' own published rates, quotes owners have shared with us, and figures we have worked through ourselves — and each guide says which is which. Every calculation on the site is shown rather than asserted, so you can swap in your own numbers and disagree with ours. Pages carry the date they were last checked. Coverage is not for sale; the editorial policy sets out the rest, including how we are paid.