Make

For a solo founder, Make (formerly Integromat) is the closest thing to hiring an operations assistant you do not have to pay a salary. It is a no-code automation platform: you build a “scenario” on a visual canvas, chaining steps that trigger on an event, then move and transform data across the apps you already use.

What it does for a one-person business: catch a new form submission and file it, route an inbound email to the right place, copy a new customer into your CRM and your accounting tool at once, post to your channels on a schedule. You drop AI steps into the same canvas when you want a model to classify, draft, or extract, so a budget-conscious operator can build genuinely useful AI automations without a developer.

The catch is honest and worth knowing before you commit. The free tier is real but capped on operations; pricing scales with how many steps your scenarios run, so a high-volume automation can outgrow the cheap plans faster than you expect. Plan it once, watch your operation count, and it is one of the best-value tools on this list for someone running everything themselves. Setup is an afternoon, not minutes, because the power comes from configuring each step deliberately.