I have found a lot of benefit over the last few years in reading about others' tech stacks for one-person businesses, so I figured I would write about mine. I've included notes to flesh out the reasoning behind my decisions where I felt the urge to expound. Hopefully this benefits you in some way. Please note that some of the links below are affiliate links. 

As a point of departure, it's worth noting that I have put many of my eggs in one basket with Zoho One as my ERP. At $30/month, it provides a disproportionate amount of value for me. The individual tools that are included in the bundle may not be 'best of breed', but I prefer the integrated approach where possible, rather than having to retroactively link point solutions. This limits the number of apps that I have to integrate via third-party providers, such as Zapier and Make.com.

Please feel free to suggest potential improvements—all contributions are welcome. 

Content management

• Course hosting and syllabus management: Systeme.io ($27/month)

  • Nowadays there are all-in-one course management platforms such as Thinkific, Teachable and Systeme.io that allow you to create a landing page for your course, integrate the payment processing and manage your syllabus all-in-one. I use Systeme.io because it offers course hosting at my domain (www.logseqmastery.com/school), simple sales funnel tools and campaign management. Their free version is one of the most generous offers you'll find online, especially if you want to start a simple blog for free. If you want to sell some digital product, the free plan doesn't take any percentage of transactions, unlike some of the competitors mentioned.

• Websites / blogs: Ghost for OneStutteringMind ($31/month) and Zoho Sites for this site, combiningminds.org (included in Zoho One)

Finances

• Book-keeping: ZohoBooks (included in Zoho One)

  • Some of the popular alternatives in this area are Xero and Intuit Quickbooks, but my integration requirements and need for multi-currency transactions meant that these quickly became too expensive. Furthermore, when I trialled them, some transactions did not come through as desired. Zoho Books has not let me down. It felt clunky at first, but now that I've set everything up and gotten used to it, it runs seamlessly. The invoicing process is simple, and it also integrates with my banking and payment providers.

• Payments: Stripe and PayPal (both % based)

  • PayPal takes quite a chunk in fees, around 4% of the transaction and an additional 2.5% on currency conversion, so I prefer to use Stripe. However, I had a number of requests to add a PayPal option, so I'd rather take the hit on pricing, than not make the sale at all. 

• Direct payments from consulting clients: Zoho Pay (included in Zoho One) 

  • Integrates with Stripe if I need to get direct payments from clients.

• Banking: Revolut and Wise (transaction based)

  • Most of my earnings are paid into my Wise account, which I then convert and send over to my South African bank account. The transfer fees add up over time, but I've found the service to be reliable and I have yet to come across a competitor with a better offering.

Workflow automation

• Online relational database: Airtable (free up to 1200 records) and Google Sheets (free)

  • I use Airtable as a secondary database that stores all my transactions for ease of reference and to faciliate integrations. I also mirror most of the data in Google Sheets, as almost every application on the internet integrates with Sheets. However, Sheets doesn't compare to Airtable when it comes to managing the information in your database.

• Automation: ZohoFlow (included in Zoho One) and Zapier (Starter plan, $19.99/month)

  • Zapier does a lot of the heavy lifting for my integrations, and they have an impressive number of integrated apps. It is relatively expensive compared to Make.com, but there are many services that it integrates with that Make.com doesn't, e.g. Systeme.io. The integration process and user interface also feel more refined.

Writing and marketing

• Note-taking and personal knowledge management: Logseq 

• Project management: Tana (currently free in early-alpha, but expected to cost $10/month)

• Campaigns / emailers: Zoho Campaigns (included in Zoho One)

• Thread-writing: Typefully ($96/year)

• Writing edits: Quillbot ($49.95/ year)

• Image creation: Midjourney ($10/month)

Video creation

• Video recording: OBS (Open source - $2/month contribution)

• Video editing: DaVinci Resolve (free)

• Animations and graphics:  Microsoft PowerPoint 2021 (purchased Office 2021 as a one-off to avoid Office365 subscription)

Customer management and feedback

• CRM: Zoho CRM (included in Zoho One)

• Feedback surveys: Zoho Survey (included in Zoho One)

• Forms: Zoho Forms (included in Zoho One)

Total costs

Total monthly costs for this stack amount to ~$130 per month for monthly subscription services and ~$146 for annual subscription services. This brings the total annual sum to just over $1700 per year.