In my experience, the best tools are usually free.

It depends on your level of expertise and the type of tool. For instance, Sphinx to write documentation is free, but you need to have at least a desire to write in markup to create it, and I'm assuming that single-sourcing multiple user manuals with conditional text and variables is not exactly trivial. Plus, sharing the writing of such a user manual between more than one person requires the use of a third-party solution, a version control system, which also requires some training & expertise to use properly.

Where as, on the other hand, if you can convince your boss to dish out $200 a month per user for something like Author-It, you get an extremely powerful system that does everything an authoring tool is supposed to. That's what I'm trying to do right now with my boss, convince him to switch (not from Sphinx, but from another cheaper software solution called Flare), and it's not an easy task.

I've found a great deal of resistance in using free tools.

Tools that cost 4 figures seem to sit "just about right" in the managerial mindset where I come from.

Some managerial cultures seem to really ( _really_ ) want to see cash laid out for anything before they will believe it holds any virtue.

I'm in the opposite situation -- I work for an Open Source project and using anything but open source software is pretty much a last resort, even though there are some (cheap) paid solutions that are better. Even free SaaS products are seen as bad as we don't 'own' the code (even moving to Github was a tough transition -- and we were using CVS!). The only way to move to one of these products is to use it on my own (as someone else has mentioned) and continually make the case for others on the team to use it.

It's true that sometimes the best tools are free, but there are a lot of organizations where you are not allowed to use even those free tools as they are not approved by some legal or IT department. The fact that those tools are free doesn't make a big difference for BigCo types of organizations.

Big companies don't usually go for free, because of the risk involved.

To answer op: Nothing. Been trying for a long time, but no luck.

Considering I am working in a construction company I couldn't disagree more.

The best tools are the ones that cost less than they make you save.

30" monitors....