Best Tools for a One-Person Marketing Agency, From Lead Lists to US Taxes

Most solo agencies can start with two paid subscriptions: Google Workspace for client email and one bookkeeping plan, either QuickBooks or Jupid. Notion, Calendly and PandaDoc can stay on free plans while the client list is short. Stripe Invoicing has no monthly charge and takes a fee per paid invoice.

01How were these tools chosen?

A tool made the list if it handles a regular job of a solo agency and has a free plan or an entry plan priced for one person. Tools that quote a price only after a sales call were left out.

02How do these tools compare on price and free plans?

Annual billing lowers the price of every subscription in the table. The gap is widest on PandaDoc Starter, where monthly billing costs almost twice as much. QuickBooks Free and the SocLeads trial are too limited for daily work, so treat them as a way to test each tool.

Full list prices from each vendor's official pricing page, US dollars, without tax or intro discounts.

03What job does each tool cover?

Each tool below covers one job (client email, books, lead lists, deals, calls, proposals, invoicing), and you need SocLeads only if you win clients by cold email.

1. Google Workspace: client email on your own domain

With Google Workspace, you send proposals, invoices and project updates to clients from your agency's domain instead of a gmail.com address.

Pick Business Standard, since Business Starter has no mail merge, appointment booking pages or eSignature with Docs and PDFs. It costs $16.80 a month on the Flexible plan or $14 a month on an annual plan. Starter is $8.40 a month on the Flexible plan. There's a 14-day free trial.

Mail merge suits personal updates to people who already know you, such as clients and past contacts. Keep cold campaigns off this account. The Google Workspace acceptable use policy bans unsolicited mass email, and breaking it can get the account suspended.

2. QuickBooks: Solopreneur plans built for a one-person business

QuickBooks sells a separate Solopreneur line, with Free and Lite plans, for people who run the business alone. Clients can pay your invoices online by card, ACH, PayPal, Venmo or Apple Pay, and your phone's GPS logs the mileage.

The Free plan allows 2 invoices, 2 receipts and 5 mileage trips a month, with 1 contractor, which is enough to try it. Invoices become unlimited if you qualify for and turn on QuickBooks Payments. Lite costs $20 a month, or $216 a year on annual billing. It removes the invoice, receipt and mileage limits and allows up to 3 contractors.

On Lite, your accountant has no access, and Expert Assisted Tax, powered by TurboTax, costs extra at filing time. If a CPA works in your books, Simple Start is the next step up. It's the first paid QuickBooks Online plan, at $38 a month or $410.40 a year, and it adds accountant access and an AI chat about your numbers, still in beta.

For an owner who files the tax return personally, Lite is enough to keep the books ready for it.

3. Jupid: bookkeeping you manage over chat, for US LLCs

If you run a single-member US LLC and have no accountant, Jupid puts the books and the tax return in one plan. When a transaction is unclear, you get a question about it via WhatsApp or iMessage and answer in the chat.

Jupid categorizes your transactions, shows what to set aside for the IRS each quarter and prepares Schedule C. Solo covers federal and state tax filing, and every account includes CPA review as needed. It connects to your bank through Plaid and imports Stripe sales, refunds and fees, so invoices you send through Stripe Invoicing land in your books.

Solo costs $50 a month or $390 a year. Skip it if your agency is registered outside the US, since the returns are prepared for the IRS and US states. For an S corp, Jupid prepares the data and routes it to a CPA for review. Its pricing page doesn't say whether the S corp return (Form 1120-S) is included in the Solo price, so check with Jupid before you elect S corp status. Owners who like doing the books themselves pay less with QuickBooks Lite.

4. SocLeads: lead lists of local businesses for cold email

When your buyers are local businesses such as salons, clinics or restaurants, SocLeads builds the cold email list from their Google Maps listings and websites. You set a city or country and a niche and get a list of businesses with their contacts.

A Google Maps row holds the name, address, category, rating, number of reviews and website. The phone comes from Google Maps and the email from the business website, when the listing and the site have them. On Google Maps searches, SocLeads bills every row, including rows with no email.

The Basic plan costs $29 a month for 2,000 contacts with email validation. Rows without an email use up contacts too, so a Google Maps list gives you fewer emails than the contacts you pay for. On the trial plan, your 100 monthly contacts come without email validation, and no credit card is required. Credits on every plan expire after one month.

SocLeads doesn't send the emails, so you run the campaign in your own cold email software. This walkthrough on Google Maps lead extraction shows how to set up a search by city and niche. In practice, SocLeads pays off when you pitch one niche across many cities. If your targets are a few named companies, you can find their contacts by hand.

5. Notion: a CRM and client pages you build yourself

Notion keeps deals, client projects and client pages in one workspace, and clients open those pages as guests. You build the CRM from a template in Notion's template gallery.

The Free plan includes databases with subtasks, dependencies and custom properties, Notion Calendar, basic forms and sites, and up to 10 guests. Plus is $12 per member a month, or $10 billed annually, with unlimited file uploads and custom forms and sites. Business, at $24 per member a month, adds Notion Agent and AI Meeting Notes. On Free, AI is available only as a trial.

Pipeline stages and deal reminders exist only once you build them on the template, while a sales CRM has them built in, along with email sync. When you outgrow Notion, plan how to move leads into a CRM built for sales. Notion works if you don't mind building the setup yourself.

6. Calendly: discovery calls clients book and pay for

With Calendly, a prospect opens the link in your email and books a free slot in your calendar. On Standard, clients can pay for a consultation when they book, through Stripe or PayPal.

On Free, you get one event type and one connected calendar. Standard costs $12 per seat a month ($10 on annual billing) and adds unlimited event types, several calendars, automations and reminders.

If you're on Workspace Business Standard with only a few inbound calls a month, its appointment booking pages may make Calendly unnecessary.

7. PandaDoc: the proposal, the contract and the signature in one document

In PandaDoc, the proposal with pricing, the contract and the client's e-signature sit in one document.

Free gives you 5 documents a month with e-signature. Starter is $35 per seat a month on monthly billing, or $19 billed annually. It includes unlimited document uploads and e-signatures and up to 5 templates. On Business, at $65 a month or $49 billed annually, you also get custom quotes, CRM integrations, a content library and approval workflows.

With one or two contracts a month, the Free plan's 5 documents cover the volume, so Starter isn't needed.

8. Stripe Invoicing: you pay only when an invoice gets paid

Stripe's Invoicing Starter takes 0.4% of each paid invoice on top of the payment fee, and Invoicing Plus takes 0.5% and adds quotes.

A $2,000 invoice paid by a US card costs $58.30 in card fees (2.9% + 30¢). Add $8 for Invoicing Starter, and Stripe keeps $66.30 in total. ACH Direct Debit fees are capped at $5.00, which helps on large retainers. Clients who prefer a bank transfer get a virtual account number on the invoice.

Stripe Invoicing doesn't keep the books, so the payments still have to reach your bookkeeping tool. On QuickBooks Lite, you can send the invoices from QuickBooks itself.

04How should a solo agency send cold email?

Use cold email software with mailboxes on a separate domain, and keep your Google Workspace domain for clients. Most senders warm those mailboxes up gradually before the first campaign and set up the domain to keep cold emails out of spam.

Under the CAN-SPAM Act, the US law on commercial email, B2B messages get no exception, as the FTC's CAN-SPAM guidance explains. The From and Reply-To details and the subject line must be accurate, and the message must be identified as an ad. Each message also needs a postal address, which can be a registered P.O. box or private mailbox, plus a way to opt out. You have 10 business days to honor an opt-out.

05How is a single-member LLC taxed in the US?

By default the IRS treats a one-owner LLC as a disregarded entity, so its profit goes on Schedule C of the owner's Form 1040. The LLC can elect to be taxed as a corporation on Form 8832 instead, as the IRS page on single-member LLCs explains. On top of income tax, you owe self-employment tax of 15.3% once your net earnings reach $400. That's 12.4% for Social Security and 2.9% for Medicare, according to the IRS self-employment tax page. The Social Security part stops at a yearly earnings limit. You can deduct the employer-equivalent portion of the tax when figuring adjusted gross income.

If you expect to owe $1,000 or more, IRS guidance on estimated taxes says to pay during the year in four periods with Form 1040-ES. Each payment is figured from the income you expect for the year, on the worksheet that comes with the form. Paying 100% of the tax shown on last year's return generally avoids the underpayment penalty, with special rules for some higher-income taxpayers.

06How much does the full tool stack cost per month?

A base setup of Google Workspace Business Standard and one bookkeeping plan costs $36.80 a month on monthly billing with QuickBooks Lite, or $66.80 with Jupid Solo. On annual plans the same pairs come to $32.00 and $46.50 a month, with Notion, Calendly and PandaDoc on free plans.

Selling by cold email puts SocLeads Basic and your cold email software on top of either total, plus the mailboxes you send from. QuickBooks Simple Start instead of Lite raises the bookkeeping line to $38 a month.

The first upgrades that raise the bill are Notion Plus, Calendly Standard and PandaDoc Starter, once their free plans run out of room.

07Which tools should you start with?

Start with Google Workspace and one bookkeeping plan. Pick the plan by who prepares the tax return: you on QuickBooks Lite, your CPA on QuickBooks Simple Start, or Jupid on its Solo plan for a single-member US LLC. The rest depends on how clients find you:

• Referrals and repeat clients: Workspace and the books are enough.
• Retainers sold through proposals: add PandaDoc (Starter once you need more than 5 documents a month). On QuickBooks, send the invoices from QuickBooks, where clients already pay by card or ACH. On Jupid, add Stripe Invoicing so clients can pay by card or bank transfer, and Jupid imports those sales.
• Mostly inbound calls and paid consultations: add Calendly Standard to charge for a consultation at the moment of booking.
• Selling to local businesses by cold email: add SocLeads Basic and a cold email tool, and verify the emails again before sending if a list has sat unused for a while.

08FAQ

Should I use a separate domain for cold email?

Yes. Spam reports on cold mail can lower the reputation of the domain they come from, so most cold emailers send from a domain other than the one clients write to. A subdomain of that domain gives less separation than a separate domain. Google counts mail from a subdomain together with the primary domain when it checks who is a bulk sender. Yahoo's sender best practices advise keeping bulk mail and user mail on different IPs or DKIM domains.

Should my single-member LLC elect S corp status?

Ask a CPA once profit is well above what you would pay yourself as a salary. With S corp status, you pay yourself a reasonable salary, which carries payroll taxes, and distributions above it don't carry employment taxes. The election is made on Form 2553, filed no more than 2 months and 15 days into the tax year it should cover or during the year before, as the IRS instructions explain. It adds payroll and a separate Form 1120-S return.

When should you switch from Notion to a real CRM?

Switch when follow-ups start slipping through a database you update by hand, or when a second person joins your sales work. A sales CRM has reminders and a shared pipeline ready from the start.