Starting a company in 2026 means making a hundred decisions with a tiny team, and the tools you pick early tend to stick around. The good news is that the modern starter stack is cheaper and more capable than ever: most of the tools below have generous free tiers, and together they cover the four jobs every startup has to do well — run the company, build the product, win customers, and handle money. Replit

Run the company: Notion and Slack

Every startup needs one place where plans, docs, and decisions live. Notion is that place for most early teams: wikis, roadmaps, meeting notes, and lightweight databases in a single workspace that grows with the company. Pair it with Slack for day-to-day communication, and you get a working rhythm fast — channels for each workstream, quick decisions in threads, and integrations that pull updates from your other tools into one feed. Both are free to start, which matters when every dollar is watched.

Build the product: Linear, Vercel, Supabase, and Figma

For software teams, Linear has become the default issue tracker: fast, opinionated, and built for the way modern product teams actually plan sprints. Vercel takes the pain out of shipping, with instant previews for every pull request and hosting that scales from a prototype to production without a DevOps hire. Behind the app, Supabase gives you a Postgres database, authentication, and storage as a managed service, so a small team can launch a full backend in an afternoon. And Figma remains the place where product ideas get designed and agreed before a line of code is written — designers and engineers literally working on the same canvas.

Win customers: HubSpot and Google Analytics

A product nobody knows about is a hobby, not a business. HubSpot's free CRM gives a founding team a real pipeline from day one: contacts, deals, email sequences, and a website that captures leads, all in one place. Google Analytics shows whether any of it is working — which channels bring visitors, where they drop off, and what they do after signing up. Together they turn marketing from guesswork into a loop: try something, measure it, keep what works.

Handle the money: Stripe and Mercury

Getting paid should be the easiest part of running a startup, and Stripe makes it so: checkout, subscriptions, and invoicing with a few lines of code, plus the trust that comes from a checkout customers already recognise. On the banking side, Mercury is built for startups, with accounts, cards, and treasury tools in a dashboard that feels like a modern product rather than a bank branch. With Stripe collecting revenue and Mercury holding it, the financial plumbing is sorted before the first hire in finance.

The stack that scales

None of these tools is exotic, and that is the point. Each one is proven, well documented, and used by thousands of companies at every stage, so a stack built on them rarely needs to be rebuilt. Start with the free tiers, add paid plans only when usage demands it, and keep the total tool count low — ten tools, each doing one job well, beats thirty tools nobody fully adopts. Pick this stack, and your team spends its energy on customers and product, not on tooling.

10 Tools Every Startup Should Use in 2026