Starting a side hustle selling digital products is a great way to make extra money. However, in the beginning, you often don’t have a lot of money to invest in software and tools to create digital products.
Don’t worry, though! Today, I’m covering the top seven best free tools to create digital products so you can get started immediately.
(This post contains affiliate links and you can read the full disclosure here)
- Canva
Canva is a free graphic design platform with many tools and templates available to make a massive range of digital products. Their platform features a user-friendly interface with easy drag-and-drop tools, pre-designed templates, and a huge library of fonts, images, and design elements that you can use to make digital products like printables, flyers, logos, posters, and more.
You can use Canva as a web-based platform or mobile app to design products on the go.
The best part? You don’t need any design experience — especially if you use Canva’s pre-designed templates as a base to get you started creating your digital products.
2. PicMonkey
PicMonkey by Shutterstock is a web-based design platform that is especially good for editing images and creating graphics and other visual tools. I love the wide variety of features PicMonkey offers, including basic image editing, touchups and effects, adding text to your images, and designing graphics.
Like Canva, it has an easy drag-and-drop interface that makes it simple for beginners to use when creating digital products. It’s an excellent choice for creating posters, cards, flyers, invitations, and much more.
PicMonkey offers a seven-day free trial to get you started, then a monthly subscription of only $7.99, making it an affordable tool for long-term use.
3. Microsoft Office
When we think of Microsoft Office, most of us think of boring school applications or using it for work at the office. However, Microsoft Office has many unique features that are excellent for designing digital products.
Microsoft Office’s web-based version is free and includes many great applications. Here are just a few of the software options included in Microsoft Office and the different ways you can use them to create digital products:
- Microsoft Word: A fantastic tool for creating printables, such as flyers, business cards, postcards, and brochures. Word offers a library of free templates to get you started.
- Powerpoint: Powerpoint can be used to design beautiful printables, but you can also make creative digital products, like work presentation templates, party games, and more.
- Microsoft Create: This program is specially designed to help you quickly create school flyers, budgets, social media posts, birthday cards, and much more.
- Excel: Spreadsheets are a very popular and constantly growing digital product niche, and many will pay good money for an aesthetically pleasing but functional spreadsheet. Consider making budgets, habit trackers, medication trackers, goal planners, and client trackers to sell.
Just a few of Microsoft Create’s free offerings!
4. Creative Fabrica
Creative Fabrica is a digital marketplace giving users access to many digital assets, including fonts, templates, graphics, and design tools. You’ll find both free and paid assets on this platform.
I like that Creative Fabrica sorts its assets into user-friendly categories, such as graphic design, embroidery, or crafting. You’ll also find a library of resources and tutorials on their website.
If you love Creative Fabrica for digital product creation, look into their “All Access Pass,” which gives you unlimited access to thousands of graphics, fonts, and other design elements.
I searched “free calligraphy” under their fonts category and came up with many free fonts to use for digital product creation.
5. Free Stock Image Websites
Interested in creating flyers, posters, ebooks, presentation materials, or other digital products that need eye-catching photos?
You don’t have to be a photographer. Instead, get your hands on fantastic stock images that are free for commercial use.
Some of my favorite stock image websites offering photos free for commercial use include:
Websites like Canva already have a library of free images built into their software for commercial use, so check there too.
6. Google Sheets or Excel
As previously mentioned, spreadsheets are a fantastic digital products niche on Etsy and other marketplaces. Not only are they popular, but you can make spreadsheets for just about anything or any target demographic. For example, you could make wedding planning, budget, fitness, business, medical, bookkeeping, or to-do list spreadsheet templates.
Both Google Sheets and Excel are popular choices as you can easily list and share a template with your customers, and they are user-friendly programs that are widely used.
Another significant benefit of creating spreadsheet templates is that you can typically charge a higher price point for these compared to a simple printable. Spreadsheet users have a lot of value to reap from an effective budget, to-do list, or planning spreadsheet, so the higher price point won’t make them bat an eye.
Just a couple of the top spreadsheet template results on Etsy!
7. YouTube
YouTube offers endless information about any topic you want to learn about, including creating and marketing digital products.
Whether you need to troubleshoot a program, learn to use Canva or Excel, or find more free stock photo resources, YouTube has videos out there that are ready to help you create your own unique digital products. Once you find creators you enjoy, don’t forget to subscribe or bookmark their channel so that you can return for additional resources in the future.
Interested in learning more about the best tools for creating digital products? My course, Digitally Purposed, gives a detailed breakdown of everything you need to know about selling digital products, from start to finish, so you can start making money quickly.
