There are many free applications on the web which often could replace the ‘paid’ versions but people on the whole feel that you get what you pay for – not always true when looking at free software.
However, I tried Rekid.Net and found it frustrating when attempting to create a button, but even using the default, there was no button created. Nothing happened. I did create a simple Avatar which you can see here, and I created a text image using this software.
I also tried Google docs & spreadsheets. It looks as though it would be a good way to collaborate in creating a document, although I didn’t get as far as trying to import it into another word processing program.