u/shy_guy997

Every dollar matters when you're bootstrapping and spending hundreds or thousands a year on cap table software feels insane when you have three people on your cap table. But you also can't just wing it with a google sheet forever because that's how you end up with equity mistakes that cost you way more down the line.

So I looked into what's actually available for free or cheap that won't leave you scrambling when it's time to raise or bring on employees.

Mantle has a free starter plan and it's honestly one of the best cap table management softwares with unlimited stakeholders. No credit card required to get started. If you eventually need more features like 409a integration or SAFE issuance with signing, their paid plan is a flat annual fee which is still cheaper than most competitors.

Eqvista also offers a pretty generous free tier. You can manage shares and do basic modeling without paying anything. The interface is a bit dated compared to newer platforms but it works.

Pulley has a startup friendly entry point too though you'll need to talk to sales to get exact pricing for smaller teams.

Carta's free plan got discontinued a while back and their lowest tier is expensive for what you get at the bootstrapped stage. Not impossible but hard to justify when free alternatives exist.

For anyone bootstrapping my advice is start with a real platform from day one even if it's the free tier. Migrating off spreadsheets later is a massive pain and the longer you wait the messier it gets. A free cap table tool today saves you expensive cleanup tomorrow.

Not benchmarks, not demos. Just what held up when I tried to use them for actual work over a few weeks.

OpenClaw Most capable of anything in this space. The agentic depth is real and the community is genuinely impressive. The problem for me is the permission model. Broad machine access while auditing is still community-driven is a tradeoff I'm not comfortable making for anything touching real work accounts. Still use it for sandboxed stuff and experimentation. Not for email or anything with credentials.

Vellum surprised me on how good of an AI assistant it was handling real work tasks. Narrower than either but the thing I actually trust with work accounts. Runs locally, five minute install, you define exactly what it can touch. Running it alongside OpenClaw right now. OpenClaw for the ambitious stuff in a sandboxed environment, vellum for anything involving real inboxes or calendars where I need to know exactly what it's authorized to do. github.com/vellum-ai/vellum-assistant

Hermes The self-improving skills loop is the most interesting on this one. The execution is the problem. It evaluates its own outputs and almost always decides it did well. Bad outputs generate bad skills, the skills persist, you manually fix them, the next improvement cycle overwrites your edits. Also requires managing your own server infrastructure. Not realistic for most people.