The $0 Marketing Stack I Use to Grow 3 Apps

I spend $0 on ads across three apps. Not by design, at least not initially, but that's where things are. Balance Pro (personal finance), Limelight (movie and TV tracking, at thelimelight.app), and GrowthMap (the tool you're reading this on) all run on the same free-tool stack with a combined marketing investment of about 2.5 hours per week.

I want to be clear about what this is and what it isn't. This is not a "prove you don't need a budget" piece or a badge of resourcefulness. No ad spend is a constraint, and constraints shape strategy whether you intend them to or not. What I've found is that the constraint has been mostly clarifying: it forces every marketing hour to produce something that compounds, because there's no paid acquisition channel available to paper over wasted effort. This is the actual stack, the real weekly hours, and an honest accounting of what I'd spend money on if I had more of it.

Why $0 in ad spend, exactly?

The short answer is that the economics of early-stage mobile apps make paid acquisition difficult to validate. Balance Pro starts at $4.99 per month. If I'm paying $4 or $5 per click on Google or Meta, the math only works if I have reliable conversion rate data, a meaningful LTV, and enough volume to optimize against. In the early stages of a product, I have none of those. Running paid traffic before those numbers are established is mostly paying for data, and you can collect a lot of the data you need through organic channels first.

The longer answer is that I'm one person running three products. Paid acquisition doesn't just require budget, it requires time to manage, optimize, and interpret. A channel that runs itself poorly is worse than no channel at all. The free channels I use are mostly set-it-and-let-it-compound, which is what I actually have capacity to maintain.

What does the full free tool stack look like?

Analytics

PostHog (free tier, up to one million events per month) handles product analytics for all three apps. I use it for event tracking, funnels, session recordings, and retention cohorts. The free tier is genuinely generous, and for any early-stage product it's more than sufficient. Before I landed on PostHog, I was evaluating four separate paid analytics tools. Now I use one, it's free, and it's more capable than most of what I was considering paying for.

App Store Connect (free) gives me iOS-specific data for Balance Pro and Limelight: impressions, conversion rates from browse and search, keyword-attributed downloads, and crash reports. It's built into the Apple Developer program every iOS developer already pays for. Most developers underuse it. The keyword data in particular shows exactly which search terms are driving installs, which is the core input for App Store optimization.

Google Search Console (free) covers web search performance for GrowthMap. It shows which queries are generating impressions and clicks, how rankings are moving, and which pages are pulling traffic. For a content-heavy site, it's essential and it's free. There is no cheaper version of this data.

Design

Figma (free tier) handles everything visual: blog cover images, social graphics, and App Store screenshots. The free tier allows unlimited personal projects. For App Store screenshots specifically, the community template library has solid starting points and saves meaningful time. I don't notice any quality difference between the free and paid tiers for image export work. The only real limitation of the free tier is the number of active collaborators, which isn't relevant when you're working alone.

For app UI, I lean on Apple's SF Symbols library. It's free with the platform, it's extensive, and it keeps the design coherent across iOS system context without requiring original icon work.

Content

The GrowthMap blog is itself part of the marketing stack. Blog posts that rank for search terms like "competitor analysis free tools" or "find where your customers hang out" pull in the exact audience that might need a growth playbook. This is the highest-leverage content channel I have because the work compounds: a post published today keeps producing traffic for months.

I use Claude via the Anthropic API for drafting assistance and structural work on blog posts. Not for generating content wholesale, but for the parts of writing that are friction: turning a rough outline into a structured draft, checking for gaps in an argument, or generating a few headline variations to react to. At API rates, it costs cents per session. Every SaaS writing tool I've evaluated charges $20 to $50 per month for a worse version of this. The API is the correct choice here.

Social distribution

Threads is my primary social channel. Organic reach is reasonable for a Meta platform at this stage, and the indie developer and founder community there is genuine. I post about what I'm building, what I'm learning, and occasionally what I'm confused about. It works well enough that I've deprioritized everything else.

Email

Resend (free tier, 3,000 emails per month) handles all transactional email for GrowthMap: magic link authentication, report delivery, and order confirmation. For what transactional email needs to do, it's clean and reliable. The free tier covers everything at my current volume.

App Store research

AppFollow (free tier) gives me keyword ranking checks for Balance Pro and Limelight. The free tier covers what I need: tracking a handful of target keywords and monitoring whether rankings are moving in response to metadata changes.

Manual competitor review reading in the App Store and Play Store rounds this out. I read competitor reviews not just to understand how customers talk about the competition, but to find the language I should be using in my own listings. The vocabulary in real reviews is often more useful than anything a keyword tool generates.

SEO

Google Search Console, already mentioned above, handles the core web search data. Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (free for your own domain) adds backlink data and site health diagnostics. For understanding your own domain's SEO posture, the free tier is sufficient. I use it mainly for discovering which posts have picked up inbound links and identifying any crawl issues.

The last piece is manual: reading competitor pages and Google search results directly. There's no tool that replaces actually looking at what ranks and understanding why.

What does the actual weekly routine look like?

This covers all three apps, not just one. Total time is around 2.5 hours per week, which I recognize sounds low. It is low. The goal isn't coverage of every possible channel, it's consistent execution of the compounding ones.

Day	Task	Time
Monday	PostHog check across all three apps: weekly actives, key funnels, any unusual drop-offs	15-20 min
Tuesday	Write or draft one blog post for GrowthMap	60-90 min
Wednesday	Respond to App Store reviews, check reply queue for Balance Pro and Limelight	15 min
Thursday	Google Search Console: check keyword movement on GrowthMap blog posts, note any ranking changes	15 min
Friday	Draft two or three Threads posts for the following week, schedule or post	30 min

A few things worth noting about this structure. The Tuesday writing block is the center of gravity. If I do nothing else in a given week, writing and publishing one post moves the needle more than any other single activity. The analytics checks on Monday and Thursday are diagnostic, not decision-making, meaning I'm looking for signals that something needs attention, not running deep analysis every week. The review response on Wednesday is the highest-trust activity in the stack: a thoughtful reply to a frustrated user on a public App Store listing is visible to everyone who looks at the app.

What would I pay for with a $500/month budget?

Apple Search Ads

The economics are as clean as paid acquisition gets for a mobile app: you bid on search terms inside the App Store, you pay per tap, and you're reaching people who are already in the store with intent to download something. I know my App Store conversion rates from App Store Connect. Once I have that data, I can calculate a target cost-per-tap that's profitable, which means I can run Apple Search Ads at a known ROI rather than guessing. This is the highest-leverage paid channel for any iOS app and the first place I would spend.

Kit (formerly ConvertKit)

I have a blog that's producing consistent traffic, and right now I'm not capturing any of it into an email list. Resend handles transactional email, but it's not built for audience-building. An email list around the GrowthMap blog content is the logical next distribution layer. I'd use Kit because it's designed for creators doing exactly this kind of content-plus-product work.

Ahrefs at $99/month

The free Webmaster Tools tier tells me about my own domain. A full Ahrefs subscription tells me about competitor keyword rankings, site traffic estimates, and backlink profiles across all my products. For serious keyword strategy, especially as the GrowthMap blog grows, the data jump from free to paid is worth it. But it's third priority, not first.

What would I not pay for?

AppFollow at full price

The free tier covers the keyword ranking checks I actually run. The paid tiers add features I don't need at my current stage: competitor tracking at scale, review management across large portfolios, team features. When I'm running a larger app with substantial review volume and a team, the paid tier might make sense. Right now it doesn't.

AI writing tools as SaaS subscriptions

I looked at Jasper, Copy.ai, and a few others when I was setting up the blog workflow. Every one of them costs $20 to $50 per month for a model that is less capable than Claude, wrapped in a UI I don't particularly need. Using Claude directly via the Anthropic API costs a fraction of any of those subscriptions and gives me a better result. If you're building any kind of content workflow, the API route is almost always cheaper and better than the SaaS wrapper.

The stack is a starting point, not an identity

I'm not attached to spending $0 on marketing. When revenue from these products grows to where paid acquisition makes economic sense, I'll use it. The free stack works at this stage because the products are early, the channels are compounding, and consistency at 2.5 hours per week is producing results I can measure.

The traps I see most often are investing in tools before having a repeatable process, spreading across ten channels instead of doing two things well, and treating "free" as the goal rather than the constraint it actually is. A free tool used inconsistently produces nothing. A $99/month tool used well pays for itself. The question is always whether you have the process to justify the tool, not whether the price is zero.

If you're at the point where manual competitor research and guesswork are slowing you down, I wrote a companion piece on doing free competitor analysis without a paid tool stack. And if the channel question is still open, finding where your customers actually gather is the prerequisite to any distribution strategy worth running.