---
title: "How to Start a Business With No Money (2026): Real Costs, Free Tools | Opulon"
description: "How to start a business with no money in 2026: every line a legal, findable business needs, priced in dollars and euros, the free version of each, the order that saves the little you have, and the honest answer on grants."
image: https://opulon.org/images/blog/how-to-start-a-business-with-no-money.webp
---

[Product & Strategy](https://opulon.org/blog?cat=product-strategy)

# How to Start a Business With No Money: What It Actually Costs in 2026, and What Is Free

- Published — September 3, 2026

![How to start a business with no money — the cost ladder, the free tools and the order that saves money](https://opulon.org/images/blog/how-to-start-a-business-with-no-money.webp)

Short answer: start with a service you already know how to do, sell it to one person before you register anything, and spend nothing until a customer has paid you. The legal minimum for running a business in 2026 is a few dollars in most US states and, filed online, 0 € in Slovakia. The expensive things are the ones people buy first and need last: a logo, a website, a company, a course. Below is every line, priced, with the free version beside it.

The people typing “how to start a business with no money” into Google are mostly not being dramatic. In the Federal Reserve’s latest household survey, **37 percent** of US adults could not cover a surprise $400 expense from cash or its equivalent, and 12 percent could not have paid it at all (Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2025, May 2026). The advice waiting for them at the top of the results is written by a bank, a card issuer and a business-plan software company, and between them those three pages print no dollar figure whatsoever. This one prints all of them: what it costs to exist legally, to be found and to get paid, in dollars and in euros, with the free version of each line next to the paid one, and the point at which free starts costing you customers.

“No money” is rarely what stops people. Spending the little they have in the wrong order is. The usual first-week purchases, a logo, a domain with a template site on it, a company registration, an online course, add up to a few hundred dollars and produce no customer. The things that produce a customer, a conversation, a quote, a piece of work done for someone who already trusts you, cost nothing. A business needs four things to exist: a customer, a legal way to invoice that customer, a way to be found and paid, and a way to keep what is left after tax. Everything else is optional in year one.

## What “no money” actually has to buy

Every price below was checked on the seller’s or the authority’s own page in September 2026. Where a line is free, it is free in the ordinary sense: no trial, no card on file.

| What you need | Free or near-free version | What it costs when you pay | When to pay |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| A customer | A conversation and a written quote; the first job done for someone who already knows you | Advertising, once you know which sentence sells (see our guides to [Google Ads](https://opulon.org/blog/how-to-run-google-ads) and [Meta ads](https://opulon.org/blog/how-to-run-meta-ads)) | Never before you have sold one by hand |
| A legal form | US: trading as a sole proprietor needs no formation filing, though a local licence or a DBA may; Slovakia: a trade licence filed online costs 0 € for a free trade and 11 € per craft or regulated trade (7 € and 22 € on paper; administrative fees act, item 148, 2026) | US LLC filing: $35 in Montana, $40 in Kentucky, $300 in Texas, $500 in Massachusetts, $70 in California plus an $800 annual tax (state filing offices, 2026); Slovak s.r.o.: a flat 220 € court fee, electronic-only since 17 August 2026, plus 5 000 € of registered capital (court fees act, item 17; Commercial Code §108, 2026) | When a client’s contract, a co-founder or real liability requires it |
| A tax number | US EIN: “You never have to pay a fee for an EIN” (IRS, August 2026); Slovakia: registration with the tax office carries no fee | Nothing. Every site charging for this is reselling a free form | Day one |
| A name you can keep | Searching the USPTO trademark database and the Slovak company and trade registers is free | Registering the mark: $350 per class in the US (USPTO, 2025), €850 for one EU class online (EUIPO, 2026), €120 e-filed for three classes in Slovakia (ÚPV SR, 2026) | Check before you print anything; register once the brand is earning |
| A domain | At-cost registrars charge the registry price: a .com is $10.26 a year wholesale, rising to $10.97 on 1 November 2026 (Verisign, April 2026), plus ICANN’s small fee; a .sk costs registrars 10 € a year at the registry (SK-NIC, 2025 price list) and you about 21 € with VAT at a large retail registrar (Websupport, 2026) | The same domain at a retail registrar, with the add-ons declined | Year one. It is the cheapest permanent asset you will own |
| A website | One page on Cloudflare’s Workers Free plan ($0 a month, static asset hosting included) or a free builder tier. GitHub Pages is free for public repositories, but its terms say it is “not intended for or allowed to be used as a free web-hosting service to run your online business” (GitHub Docs, 2026) | A site built by someone else: the honest ranges are in [what a website costs](https://opulon.org/blog/website-cost) | After the first paying customers, when you know what the page has to say |
| Being found | A Google Business Profile: “free,” in Google’s own words, and you “add or claim your business at no charge” (Google, 2026) | Search and AI-visibility work, later | Day one for any local or service business |
| Design | Canva Free at US$0; the free tiers of ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini for a first logo draft and first copy | Identity work by a designer: the ranges are in [what branding costs](https://opulon.org/blog/branding-cost) | When the cheap logo starts losing you deals, and not before |
| Invoicing | Wave’s Starter plan: $0, “unlimited estimates, invoices, bills” (Wave, 2026); in Slovakia iDoklad’s free plan at 0 € for up to five contacts (iDoklad, 2026) | Paid tiers from about $19 or 5 € a month | When you pass the free limit |
| Getting paid | A bank transfer costs you nothing | Card payments through Stripe: 2.9% + $0.30 per US domestic card, 1.5% + €0.25 per standard European card, no monthly fee (Stripe, 2026) | When customers ask to pay by card |
| Tax and contributions | Unavoidable. US self-employment tax is 15.3% of profit (IRS, 2026); in Slovakia, health insurance from month one at a minimum of 121,92 € a month unless you are also employed, and social insurance from the sixth month at 131,34 € a month on the 2026 micro-rate (VšZP and Sociálna poisťovňa, 2026) | Set the money aside from the first invoice | Month one |
| Insurance, an accountant | Not free, and the first things worth paying for | Depends on the trade; the SBA lists both among the common startup costs no business escapes (SBA, 2026) | Your first profitable quarter |

Read down the “free” column and the shape of a zero-money start appears. A legal, findable, invoiceable service business costs somewhere between **nothing and about $50** in year one in most of the United States, and 0 € in fees in Slovakia, if you decline the things you were going to buy first. Contributions are a separate matter, and they get their own section below. The right-hand column is what people buy in week one, and it is where “no money” businesses actually die.

## The order that saves the little you have

The sequence matters more than the budget. Done in the order below, each step is paid for by the one before it.

### 1. Sell one thing to one person before you register anything

A business with no money is a service business, because a service is the only product whose inventory is your time. You do not need permission to quote a price to someone. Ask one person who already knows your work what they would pay for it, agree a number, do the job, and invoice them the day it is done. That invoice is your business plan. It proves demand, sets your price, and tells you what the website eventually has to say.

Paul Graham wrote the founding text on this in 2013: “The most common unscalable thing founders have to do at the start is to recruit users manually. Nearly all startups have to.” And: “You can’t wait for users to come to you. You have to go out and get them.” Eric Ries’s definition of a minimum viable product is the same idea in different clothes, “that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort” (2009). For a one-person service business, the minimum viable product is a delivered job and a paid invoice.

The people who have done it say the same thing in plainer words. In a 2025 thread on r/smallbusiness that Google now ranks first for this question, one of the most upvoted answers was that “some businesses require time more than money,” and another commenter’s advice was to “go sell your first client, then figure out how to fulfill the job.” A third listed his entire startup budget for a pet-waste business: a $5 rake, a $25 dustbin, a $50 logo from Fiverr and a $45 high-visibility vest, and reported a couple of thousand dollars in revenue three months later. The order in that list is the order that works: he bought the rake before the logo.

If you do not know what to charge, read [how to price your services](https://opulon.org/blog/how-to-price-your-services) before the first quote. If you do not know where the first customer comes from, [how to get clients](https://opulon.org/blog/how-to-get-clients) is the long version; the short version is that the first three come from people who already know you.

### 2. Register when the law makes you, not when it makes you feel official

In the United States, the moment you sell something as an individual you are a sole proprietor. Most states do not require a formation filing for that. What you may need is a local business licence, a DBA if you trade under a name that is not your own, and sales tax registration if you sell taxable goods. The tax number is free from the IRS in minutes, and the IRS’s own page carries a warning worth repeating: “Beware of websites that charge for an EIN. You never have to pay a fee for an EIN” (IRS, August 2026).

An LLC is a liability shield and a signal, and both are worth paying for at the right time. The right time is when a client’s contract asks for one, when a co-founder joins, or when the work carries real risk. The price is set by the state: **$35 in Montana, $40 in Kentucky, $300 in Texas, $500 in Massachusetts**, and California charges $70 to file and then $800 a year in franchise tax whether or not you earn anything (state filing offices and the California Franchise Tax Board, 2026). Filing services add their own fee on top of those numbers for a form you can submit yourself.

In Slovakia the sequence is similar and the fees are lower. A free-trade licence (voľná živnosť) filed through slovensko.sk with a chipped ID card costs nothing; on paper it is 7 €, and craft or regulated trades cost 11 € online or 22 € on paper (administrative fees act, item 148, 2026). The licence is valid from the day of filing and the certificate arrives within three working days (Trade Licensing Act, §10 and §47, 2026). A limited company, an s.r.o., is the Slovak LLC: since 17 August 2026 the filing is electronic-only under the new commercial register act, the court fee is a flat 220 €, and the law requires 5 000 € of registered capital, which a sole founder must pay in full before registration, though it no longer has to sit in a bank account (Commercial Code §108, §111 and §60; court fees act, item 17, 2026). Choose the s.r.o. for the same reasons as the LLC, and not before.

### 3. Build only what a paying customer needs

Once someone has paid you, you know three things you did not know before: what they bought, what they called it, and what convinced them. That is the brief for everything you build next, and it is why the website comes after the first invoice rather than before it.

Check the name first, because the free checks are the ones people skip. The USPTO’s trademark database is free to search, the Slovak company register and trade register are free to search, and a five-minute look saves you the cost of a rebrand later. The method is in [how to name a business](https://opulon.org/blog/how-to-name-a-business); the short form is that a name which is free to register is not the same as a name you own.

Then claim the free assets in this order: a Google Business Profile, because for a local or service business it is the listing that appears before any website; a domain, because it is the only thing on this list you will still own in ten years and it costs about the price of lunch; and one page on a free host that says what you do, for whom, at what price, with a way to reach you. Whether you need more than that page in year one is the subject of [do you still need a website](https://opulon.org/blog/do-i-need-a-website), and the honest answer for most service businesses is: not yet.

What you do not need in year one is a logo from a designer, a brand identity, a custom site, or a course on any of them. Those are the things an agency sells, and we say that as one: the ranges in [what branding costs](https://opulon.org/blog/branding-cost) and [what a website costs](https://opulon.org/blog/website-cost) are real, and they are for businesses that already have customers to lose.

### 4. Spend your first $500 on the thing that produces the next customer

The questions people ask alongside this one are “is $5,000 enough to start a business?” and “what business can I start for $500?” The honest answer to both is that the number matters less than the order. Here is the ladder.

- **$0:** a sold service, a free tax number, a free Google listing, free invoicing, a bank transfer. This is a business. It can invoice, it can be found, and it pays tax.
- **$500:** the domain, a year of any paid tool the free tier no longer covers, the LLC in a cheap state, and the first insurance premium. Nothing on this rung is marketing.
- **$5,000:** the point at which paying someone else becomes rational: an accountant for the first year-end, a few hundred dollars of advertising on the one message that already sells, a site built by someone who has read the invoices. This is the first rung where an agency belongs, and only after the first three are done.

Spend the $500 on the rung above only when the rung below is producing revenue. The usual failure is to buy the $5,000 rung first with money borrowed against a business that does not yet exist.

## Can you get a grant to start a business?

In the United States, no, not from the federal government. USA.gov states it in one sentence: “There are no federal grants for starting a business” (August 2026), and the Small Business Administration’s grants page says the same about itself: “SBA does not provide grants for starting and expanding a business” (SBA, 2026). The grants that exist go to nonprofits, research and state programmes. Some states, cities and private foundations run small competitive programmes, and the search for them is worth an hour, not a month. The answer to the question people ask most often here, whether an LLC can get grant money, is that the legal form changes nothing; the federal money is not there for any form.

The honest funding picture from the Federal Reserve’s 2026 survey of small firms is that founders pay for it themselves. Among employer firms that hit a financial challenge in the previous year, 54 percent used the owner’s personal funds, and among firms with no employees the share was 64 percent (Small Business Credit Survey, March and July 2026). Debt comes later and is usually secured against the owner: 59 percent of firms with debt gave a personal guarantee.

Slovakia is the exception in this article, and it is a real one. Under §49 of the Employment Services Act, a person who has been registered as unemployed for at least three months can apply to the labour office for a contribution towards starting self-employment. From 1 January 2026 the ceiling is **6 455,88 €** in districts at or below the national unemployment average and 8 607,84 € in districts above it; up to 60 percent is paid within 30 days of the agreement and the remaining 40 percent after twelve months of trading (ÚPSVaR, January 2026). The conditions are the point: the application must include a business plan with projected costs, the business must run for at least two years without interruption or the money is repaid pro rata, a repeat application is possible only after eight years, and there is no legal entitlement, so a committee decides (Act No. 5/2004, §49, 2026). Alongside it, the state-run National Business Centre offers would-be founders up to 20 hours of free individual consulting and a 20-hour business-skills course under a national project running as of 2026 (Slovak Business Agency, 2026). It is the rare case where “money to start a business” is not a search-engine mirage.

## What you cannot avoid paying, even at zero revenue

You can start a business with no money. You cannot run one with none, and the costs that arrive on their own are the ones to know in advance.

In the United States, self-employment tax is **15.3 percent** of net profit: 12.4 percent for Social Security on the first $184,500 of earnings in 2026 and 2.9 percent for Medicare on all of it (IRS and the Social Security Administration, 2026). It is paid in quarterly estimates, and the first one comes due whether or not you remembered to set the money aside. Some states add fixed annual charges to a registered entity regardless of income; California’s $800 is the best-known. Card fees take their percentage from every payment. None of these are large in month one. All of them are surprises to people who did not plan for them.

In Slovakia the fixed costs are contributions, and the rules changed on 1 July 2026. Health insurance starts in month one: a self-employed person who is not also an employee pays at least **121,92 €** a month in 2026, which is 16 percent of the minimum assessment base, from the first month of the licence (VšZP, 2026). Someone who keeps a job while starting on the side pays 16 percent on the actual base with no minimum advance, which is the strongest financial argument for starting alongside employment. Social insurance now begins on the first day of the sixth calendar month after the licence is issued, at a micro-rate of 131,34 € a month for 2026; from then on the insurer tests income every July, and a year with self-employment income under 2 876,90 € carries no compulsory social insurance, a year between that and 9 144 € carries the micro-rate, and above it the standard minimum of 303,11 € a month applies (Sociálna poisťovňa, 2026). Income tax is where a small service business catches a break: a sole trader who is not VAT-registered may deduct a flat 60 percent of income as expenses, up to 20 000 € a year, without a single receipt (Income Tax Act, §6(10), 2026), and from 1 January 2026 sole traders no longer pay the financial transaction tax at all (Finančná správa, December 2025).

The other unavoidable cost is time, and the survival data is the honest way to price it. On average, **67.7 percent** of new US employer establishments survive two years and 49.2 percent survive five (SBA Office of Advocacy, February 2026, covering 1994 to 2022). A business started for nothing that closes in year two has cost its founder a year of evenings and little else, which is the strongest argument in this article for starting at zero.

## Which business can you actually start with no money?

The one you already know how to do, sold to people who already know you. That answer disappoints anyone hoping for a list, so here is why it is the right one.

Almost every new business is one person. In the EU, 83.4 percent of the enterprises born in 2023 consisted solely of self-employed individuals, with no employees at all, and the average size of a newborn enterprise was 1.1 persons (Eurostat, 2026). In the United States, 82.3 percent of the 36.2 million small businesses have no employees (SBA Office of Advocacy, February 2026), and Americans filed 578,926 new business applications in July 2026 alone (Census Bureau, August 2026). In Slovakia, about 96 percent of the enterprises born in 2023 started with zero employees (Eurostat business demography data, 2023). The businesses people start with no money are the businesses people start, full stop: services, sold by the person who does them.

The lists of “100 businesses you can start for under $1,000” are not wrong, they are answering the wrong constraint. Nobody is short of ideas. People are short of a first customer, and a first customer comes fastest for the skill you have already been paid a salary to do. Bookkeeping, cleaning, design, tutoring, repairs, writing, care, coding, cooking: the “easiest business to start” is whichever of these you can do on Monday for someone who trusts you by Friday.

Two related questions deserve a plain reply. “What business has a 90 percent success rate?” None; the five-year figure above is about half, and anything quoting 90 percent is selling a franchise or a course. “What business makes $1,000 a day?” Any of them, eventually, and none of them in month one, which is why month one has to be free.

## A worked example: from zero to invoiced in six weeks

Take a bookkeeper in Kentucky who has done the job for an employer for six years and wants to do it for herself. Her first customers are two small firms whose owners she already knows through work. She quotes each of them a monthly fee, agrees it by email, and does the first month’s books on her own laptop with software she already pays for. Total spend to reach a paid invoice: $0.

In week two she applies for an EIN on the IRS site, which takes minutes and costs nothing, claims a Google Business Profile, which costs nothing, and buys her own name as a .com from an at-cost registrar for the registry price plus ICANN’s fee, a little over ten dollars. She writes one page in a free builder, or on a free host, that says what she does, who it is for and what it costs, and puts her phone number on it. Week two spend: about $11.

In week six a third client’s contract asks for a registered entity and proof of insurance. She files a Kentucky LLC for $40, budgets $15 a year for the state’s annual report, and buys a professional liability policy out of the first two months of fees. She opens a Wave account for invoicing at $0 and starts setting aside 15.3 percent of every payment for self-employment tax. Week six spend: $40 plus the premium, all of it paid from revenue.

The same story in Nitra runs on smaller numbers. A bookkeeper files a free-trade licence online for 0 € and is legal from that day. Her .sk domain costs about 21 € a year at a retail registrar. She invoices from iDoklad’s free plan until her sixth client. If bookkeeping is now her only job, health insurance takes 121,92 € a month from month one, and social insurance arrives in month six at 131,34 €; if she has kept her employment for the first year, the health minimum does not apply and the social contribution is the only fixed cost. If she was registered unemployed for three months before starting, the labour office may have funded her laptop and her first year of contributions under §49, in exchange for a business plan and a two-year commitment. Year-one fees: 0 €.

Notice what never appears in either version: a logo from a designer, a website from a studio, a course, a coworking desk, an agency. Each of those may be right in year two. In year one they are the money that “no money” founders did not have and spent anyway.

## The 2026 layer: the free tools do the work, being found is the cost

The genuinely new thing about starting in 2026 is that the first draft of everything is free. ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini all offer free tiers; Canva’s free plan produces a passable first logo; a one-page site can be written, built and hosted without spending anything. The work that used to justify a founder’s first $2,000 now takes an evening and costs nothing.

That moves the real cost somewhere less visible: being found. A business that exists on a free page under a name three other companies already use will not appear when a customer asks Google, or an AI assistant, for someone like you. In the search-demand data we pulled for this piece, the question of how to start with no money is put to AI assistants roughly three thousand times a month in the United States alone, and the assistants answer it by naming businesses they can identify. The free checks that make you identifiable, a cleared name, a claimed Google listing, consistent details everywhere you appear, are the cheapest marketing you will ever do, and the method for the AI side is in [how to get ChatGPT to recommend your business](https://opulon.org/blog/chatgpt-seo).

Free tools also carry small print. GitHub will host your public site for nothing, and its own limits page says the service is not allowed to be used to run an online business or e-commerce site (GitHub Docs, 2026). Free invoicing caps the number of contacts. A free design tool watermarks or withholds the file formats a printer needs. None of that matters in month one. All of it matters at the point where paying $5 or $19 a month is the cheapest decision of the week, and knowing that in advance is the difference between a tool that helped and a tool that stalled you.

When the day comes that you have more customers than hours and want to hand the website or the brand to someone, the honest prices are in our guides to [what a website costs](https://opulon.org/blog/website-cost) and [what branding costs](https://opulon.org/blog/branding-cost), and if you would rather ask a person first, [talk to us](https://opulon.org/contact).

[Back to all articles](https://opulon.org/blog)

## Keep reading

[![How to price your services in 2026 — cost floor, market band, value ceiling](https://opulon.org/images/blog/how-to-price-your-services.webp)How to Price Your Services in 2026 (and How Much to Charge)](https://opulon.org/blog/how-to-price-your-services)

[Product & Strategy](https://opulon.org/blog?cat=product-strategy)

## [How to Price Your Services in 2026 (and How Much to Charge)](https://opulon.org/blog/how-to-price-your-services)

- July 26, 2026

[![Where AI-built vibe-coded apps break and what fixing them costs](https://opulon.org/images/blog/vibe-coded-mvp.webp)Your Vibe-Coded MVP Worked — Until It Didn't: Where AI-Built Apps Break and What Fixing Them Costs](https://opulon.org/blog/vibe-coded-mvp)

[Product & Strategy](https://opulon.org/blog?cat=product-strategy)

## [Your Vibe-Coded MVP Worked — Until It Didn't: Where AI-Built Apps Break and What Fixing Them Costs](https://opulon.org/blog/vibe-coded-mvp)

- July 3, 2026

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