Seeing all the time, effort, emojis, drawings, and true works of art put into an Insta story, we know for sure stories are not what they once were. They’re no longer just pictures and videos shot in real-time. Stories have become a true marketing platform, with intensely strategic moves behind each piece of content published. Every Insta story most likely has a cool (maybe expensive) story app that was used to produce the content.  

With Insta stories looking more polished and aesthetically pleasing than ever, as a designer, you have to be on top of your game. But to what end and to what cost? 

I’m here to help you save a good buck. I’ve got the 10 best free Insta story apps for you to use to improve your Insta stories game without breaking the bank. Without further ado, let’s jump right in.

10 Best Free Insta Story Apps

1. Unfold

Unfold is an amazing Insta story app that is free, but also has in-app purchases if you fancy a certain look and template theme. With many texts and elements to choose from, and themes spanning from elegant or retro, there’s something for everyone.

Try it out today for free: https://unfoldstori.es/

2. Jane

A very underappreciated and not talked about enough app, in my opinion, is Jane. The app is free and has very many free beautiful templates for you to use to spice up your stories. They are quite girly and are perfect for maintaining an elegant or playful story vibe. Create amazing videos with royalty-free music and amazing visuals. Again, this app is free but has in-app purchases. 

Try it out free today: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/%E7%AE%80%E6%8B%BC-jane/id891640660

3. Canva

Canva is hands-down one of the best online CMP’s out there. It’s great for beginner and advanced designers alike. With tons of templates to choose from and customize, you’ll surely find the one that suits your style best. The mobile app is free and has in-app purchases, although you can totally rock with all the free elements and templates and just tune them to your liking.

Try out this app out for free today:https://www.canva.com/app/

4. Hype Type

With a vast and wide collection of fonts, you can do some serious designing with this app. Hype type is absolutely killing the font game. If you’re focused on spreading a message, then this is absolutely the app for you. The app is free with some paid features, but it’s up to you to decide if they’re a necessary buy. 

Check out their app now: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hype-type-moving-text-photo-s/id1152687277

5. Cut Story

Another great app for managing your stories is Cut Story. Cut Story’s is an amazing video editing app where you can create engaging videos and add music, texts, elements, your logo and more to your video. There are special features that you can buy to enhance your UX, but only if you deem necessary.

Try out their free Insta story app now:https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cutstory-for-instagram-stories/id917630934

6. Mojo Story Maker

Mojo is the way to go for Insta stories because they have 100 templates for you to choose from! Customize your stories with text to create relevance, engage with your followers and make them feel what you feel, and share the message you want to portray with them. A huge plus to this app is that you can share your new and improved story directly to your Instagram and also your Snapchat!

Try this Insta story app now: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mojo-stories-editor/id1434861974

7. InShot

For all my influencers out here, Inshot is the app for you. We don’t always have time to film, import, and edit our footage on our laptops or computers, so having this app will be a valuable asset for you. Edit all your video content in a single app on your phone and import it directly to your Instagram. This app is truly a gift to all of us creators out there.

Give it a try if you haven’t already: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.camerasideas.instashot&hl=en 

8. Adobe Spark Post

Adobe, king of all things editing programs, in my own personal opinion. Adobe has great editing programs, from video-editing to photoshopping images, and when they saw an opportunity to create an app to help you create amazing stories to tell your followers, well, we all know they wouldn’t pass that up. With this app you can do more than edit stories photos, you can also edit video and image posts. The app is initially free and then they offer you the chance to upgrade if you end up falling in love with the app.

Go ahead and give this Insta story maker a go: https://spark.adobe.com/features 

10. Over

And last, but not least, we have the app called Over. I love that when you visit their webpage, it’s just absolutely inspiring. It inspires you to be different, to stand out, the influence others. A great app for you to use to for free to make your Insta stories more engaging for your followers and for you to really create a brand name and grow your recognizability.

Stand out of the crowd and try this amazing app free today: https://www.madewithover.com/

Now that you have 10 new and fresh apps for you to choose from to start stepping up your Insta story game, it’s time for you to hop on it. Download any one of these apps and tag us in any of your Instagram stories for a chance to be featured on our stories. Our Instagram handle is @webdesignledger.

Don’t sleep on these amazing free Insta story apps! Try them out today. 

Until next time, 

Stay creative.

Whatever your business or occupation, you want to make the best use of your core competencies. These might involve web design, project management, or business management.

Your responsibilities can also involve necessary, yet tedious and time-consuming tasks. If these to be done manually, can be error-prone as well.

When these tasks require frequent attention, you’re left with less time to do what you do best.

The best solution is to invest in apps that automate these tasks. In fact, a high-quality web app can make completing them easier and faster. Many of these apps, however, require installation and updating.

These web apps can be superior choices for the solutions you’re looking for. They don’t require installation or maintenance.

Apptivo

View video on YouTube

This web app features a powerful online CRM system that sits at the core of an integrated suite of business apps. Apptivo automates your sales and marketing tasks, and provides a total view of your customer base.

You can also access this web-based system from your mobile devices.

Webflow

View video on YouTube

This web app enables you to do both design and develop custom, responsive websites — without writing a line of code, or relying on a template. It also lets you create a bespoke CMS for any website, with structured content tailored to the site’s purpose. That’s how Webflow helps creative teams break down their silos and simplify collaboration between design, dev, and content.

Paymo

View video on YouTube

This full-featured management app is suitable for individual designers and developers as well as for teams. Paymo enables you to manage your projects, track your time and expenses from start to finish. It also manages your invoicing and resource scheduling.

Nutcache

View video on YouTube

Whether you’re an old hand at managing Agile and Scrum projects, or relatively new to the game, you’ll find Nutcache to be extremely helpful. This robust, business-oriented web app manages the total project lifecycle, and does so within the Agile set of principles.

pCloud

View video on YouTube

Storing your videos, documents, photos, and other information on the cloud has its definite advantages.pCloud gives you 24/7 access to your stored information, whether it’s from your PC, tablet, or phone. It is also the first cloud storage system to offer lifetime use for a single payment.pCloud is one of the top Dropbox alternatives that you can find.

Keep up to date with the latest trends; the easy way

Every day we witness new design and project management tools appearing in the marketplace. Considering the rapid pace of development, it can be hard for a professional to keep up. Time spent on learning about the latest and greatest is also the time that’s taken away from the work at hand.

Nevertheless, you want to know about any new products that appear that can make your work easier. New tools can help you improve processes and deliverables, and boost your productivity.

If you want to save time, you’ll need to let others do the searching for you. Like that, you will still be able to improve your workflow and make your life just a little easier.

Read the reviews, study the pros and cons and find out what the potential learning curve of a new tool might be. By doing so, you can save yourself lots of time and trouble.

Summary

Design processes can vary in accordance with project types, team sizes, and the like. However, we tend to settle on a preferred set of tried and tested tools.

There is always a room for improvement. Moreover, continuous improvement should be one of the goals of any web designer.

New and improved tools, including web apps, deserve a close look. You’ll often get a significant return on your investment once you’ve put them to use.

The popular social networking platform made yet another important change that was not formally announced. Facebook made a move that has probably been planned for a long time: the platform just changed the entire messaging experience by integrating the Messenger app into its desktop version. Reactions of all kinds soon appeared online.

The change brought to Messenger app was spotted by most users, especially that this time it seems to be more than just a simple beta “test.” When we look at the home page, we notice that the Messenger icon in the blue navigation bar at the top of the screen has replaced the old inbox icon; when you click on it, you go to a radically overhauled inbox, similar to a Messenger.com.

Judging by the public statements made by its representatives, Facebook needed to go more mobile. The platform is also meant to help its users by presenting them with relevant information which can be more easily accessed. Indeed, the following features of the newest Facebook Messenger version can be quite useful:

• The new “home page” divided into modules/panes allows you to see a list of the most recent messages and the friends you chat most frequently with are highlighted in the “Favorites” module below.
• You can now easily find a particular conversation, change the chat’s color, edit nicknames.
• The new “Active Now” module allows you to see when your friends are available, and the “Birthdays” module will remind you of your friends’ birthdays.
• The new Messenger includes in-built emoji, stickers and GIF buttons, and, what is more important, payment options to transfer money to contacts, and video games.
• The new Messenger is easier to use because it gives you the possibility to reorganize your chat threads based on your favorites and active users so that you might get to important chats faster, and get immediate responses back.

On the other hand, numerous users were not pleased with the new changes, stating that the old inbox layout was better and asking how they can switch back to the old Messenger (which is not possible).

The features people mostly complained about are:

• The possibility to see your other messages on the side. This can be quite distracting and inconvenient, especially when you have lots of messages from your admiring fans and exes
• The extra space for ads that was added on the right side can be disturbing
• The bigger version of the inbox covers half of the message screen now and this can also make the app harder to use
• the message box only scrolls to the right, so users can’t easily see the whole message to guide the feel of the message or easily check for typos. That can be frustrating.
• When users try to copy parts of a conversation and save it in word, this is not possible anymore. Also, the date and time of the messages can’t be copied at all
• Users now can’t write longer messages without their paragraphs being truncated in the composer
• Messages can’t be filtered by “unread”
• Photo sharing needs improvement
• Currently, you don’t have the ability to delete individual messages within a conversation

What users generally complained about most is the fact that Facebook complicated things unnecessarily, without doing usability studies or testing the changes in focus groups first. The loss of the inbox layout shook most users which openly expressed their complaints online. People are also discontent with the fact that the Messenger app, originally designed for mobile, is now being forced upon desktop and laptop users without choice.

In reply, David Marcus, the vice president of messaging products at Facebook, stated that the changes were meant to harmonize the user experience across all platforms, especially when the app is used by 1 billion+ people primarily on mobile. Clearly, the Messaging app needed to feel and look more mobile.

Mr. Marcus also claimed that what Facebook was actually trying to do with the New app is add more value to messaging, to make it more relevant and more interesting than before. And he promised his team would look into the features that people are not currently pleased with.

Stan Chudnovsky, head of product for Messaging at Facebook, also stated that the only change brought to the network is the introduction of the new modules, which actually put together different messages or different people. Messages have been displayed in chronological order since the beginning of the smartphone era.

The Facebook representative also claimed that there is more in store for Messenger: new modules will be progressively introduced to the app because people deserve an enriched messaging experience. The need for innovation is undeniable, especially in this field. It looks like you’re going to have to keep your eyes on your smartphones to see what the platform offers you next.

Facebook’s intent is apparently to revolutionize messaging communication, but will these new changes convince the public?

What do you think about the new update? Let us know in the comment section bellow.

Have you ever thought of something that would really improve your workflow, but you just don’t have the skills to make it?

Request for Startup is a service that brings all these ideas together into one curated feed. Twitter users can send an idea to @Request4Startup for a chance to be featured on the site.

Ideas can get voted on either from the site itself, or via faves/retweets on Twitter. The highest-voted ideas naturally rise to the top for extra visibility.

Then talented developers can check out the list and pick out cool ideas that seem worth building.

You can sort by newest ideas, currently trending ideas, and the top ideas of all-time. This gives everyone a chance to get noticed and (hopefully) see some cool stuff added into the world.

Check out the Request for Startup homepage to see recent ideas or sign up for the weekly newsletter.

Folks who want in on the action should fire out a tweet to @Request4Startup to see if their idea can get listed on the website.

HTML preprocessors like Haml make coding items a breeze. However the hard-coding aspect of HTML is never fun – it’s not hard but rather mundane and monotonous.

While a webapp can’t automate the whole process, Listify can help when building HTML lists.

You simply input a raw text list of items and choose an ordered/unordered list format. You’ll also be able to specify if each list item should have an ID or various classes. You can choose spacing counts for indentations along with many other similar settings.

The Listify webapp is actually hosted for free on a GitHub project page. Anyone is free to fork the Listify repo or download a full copy for their local web server.

If you want to try it out just visit the Listify page and give it all you’ve got.

While it is rather simple, it’s also an incredible piece of automation for frontend developers who constantly find themselves transcribing Word documents into HTML.

One of the fastest time saving techniques for web development is to reuse code. Naturally this may come in the form of snippets saved locally to your computer. But it may also come in the form of code generators like Enjoy CSS.

This free webapp creates valid CSS3 code for many common features like gradients, shadows, and even transitions.

Everything works within a GUI running in your browser window so it can function on any computer with Internet access.

The app not only acts as a code generator, but also a library of previously-created items.

You can browse through custom codes for text effects, buttons, repeating patterns and so much more.

Enjoy CSS3 is more like a community for building repeatable code snippets for web development. If you want to save your creations you can sign up for free and keep all your snippets in a user account.

But it’s just as simple create your CSS anonymously as well.

Take a look at the webapp and see if you could put it to good use. Also you can stay on top of news & updates by following the Twitter account @enjoycss.

First there were social sites like Digg and Reddit covering all topics of user-powered news.

Then niche websites popped up like Hacker News and Designer News. This has paved the way for smaller communities to spring up with a focus on certain news topics.

Echo JS is a social community with a direct focus on JavaScript & frontend webdev news. Topics are submitted by the community and the ones with the most votes hit the front page.

Registration is free and your account privileges are granted immediately, unlike similar sites like Designer News.

News can be sorted by top voted, newest submissions, and even random if you’re feeling daring.

Echo JS runs on top of Lamer News which is a Ruby-based Hacker News clone script. This makes it completely open source and easy to manage.

Top news stories from the homepage are also posted on the official Twitter account @echojs. If you’re a big fan of JS then be sure to check it out and sign up to join the community.