10 free-but-professional tools for your dev projects
Tags: freelancing, career, beginners, translated
Published: 2019-01-07 15:15:09

---
title: 10 free-but-professional tools for your dev projects
published: true
description: How to use gree resources online without trade with the professionalism of it.
tags: freelancing, career, beginners, translated
series: Free - as in free beer
cover_image: https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/bxx6xtezwug5u9dxus4e.png
---
> This article has the #translated tag: [Leer el artículo en español](https://dev.to/sauloco/10-herramientas-gratuitas-pero-profesionales-para-proyectos-de-desarrollo-12i7)

Welcome to the first of this series **"Free - as in free beer"** where we'll analyze online resources with free versions we can use without trade off the quality of our project.

Most of this free-plan-versions of this services are somehow restricted, but you'll see they can fit perfectly in the dev phase of your project.

**1 [Google Documents](https://documents.new)**
_Main function_: To create and share documents between a team.
_Additional function_: To download a PDF with the document.
_Hidden trade-off_: To tell Google all our secret plans?

**2 [Trello](https://trello.com)**
_Main function_: To reduce the story from the previous document and divide it in lists, cards and checkboxes making it easy for the team to handle and easy for the client to understand.
_Hidden trade-off_: 
- You can't add more than one integration (`power-up`)
- You can't have added files bigger than 10MB

**3 [Heroku](https://heroku.com)**
_Main function_: To host the server side logic and configuration (I usually work with NodeJS APIs) in their containers (`dynos`)
_Additional function_: 
- To deploy automatically the changes sent from developing terminal.
- To save safely and usefully the aplication's secret information (env vars, tokens, passwords)

_Hidden trade-off_: The `free dynos` only have 512 MB RAM & 1 web per worker.

**4 [MLab](https://mlab.com)**
_Main function_: To host a MongoDB database and get a URL where to point our server side logic.
_Hidden trade-off_: Database can't be larger that 500 MB. Automatic backups aren't possible as vertical or horizontal scalling.

**5 [Netlify](https://netlify.com)**
_Main function_: To host a static web client and provide an URL to access the content.
_Additional function_:
- To get a custom URL pointing our own domain.
- To get SSL certificates for every domain or subdomain pointing their nameservers to Netlify's DNS.

_Hidden trade-off_: only one user per proyect, security and permission configurations are limited.

**6 [Freenom](https://freenom.com)**
_Main function_: To get a TLD for free.
_Hidden trade-off_: TLD with none or low reputation, hard to remind (can be solved with creativity). The domain get a price when it isn't renewed on time, sometimes the price becomes premium, and you can lost your domain for a few months. After that it'll become available for free again.

**7 [Keybase](https://keybase.io)**
_Main function_: Private git repository and team chat.
_Additional function_: 
- Identity validation service.
- Group and subgroup chat with channels.
- Safe file share.
- URL for public files.
- 250 GB storage.
- Git repos scope: public, group, subgroup, invididual.
- All activity in the platform is encrypted.
- Clients for main OSs, no web client.
- Direct client support

_Hidden trade-off_: The project still is a proof of concept, and their apps are constantly getting modifications (not a trade-off on itself but a comment)

**8 [Github](https://github.com)**
_Main function_: (we all know it, I'll explain how I use it in my stack) 
_Aditional function_: Netlify integration, it allows me to deploy code automatically.
_Hidden trade-off_: Github only allows public repos as free, then, I can use them for front-end only, no secrets here.

**9 [Sentry](https://sentry.io)**
_Main function_: Error monitoring.
_Hidden trade-off_: Only available in personal projects or early-stage apps

**10 [VS Code](https://code.visualstudio.com/)**
_Main function_: To edit code.
_Función adicional_:
- Native integration with git
- Thousands of extensions
- Real time colaboration, even in debugging sessions.

_Hidden trade-off_: To tell Microsoft all our secret plans?

Later in this series, I'll dig deeper about how I use every tool, so you can leave your questions here and I'll use them to write the new articles. 
Also I hope your comments in this and the next articles will improve the information, you can suggest new tools or new ways to use the shared tools.