You can turn your computer into a pretty good phonetics lab for free. (Consider sending them money anyway.)

• Praat. For recording, spectrograms, pitch tracks, waveform editing, running perception experiments, filtering, articulatory synthesis, cochleagrams, and lots more. Scriptable, too.

• R. For statistics and graphs. R is an open-source clone of S. Capabilities are comparable to SAS and better than SPSS, plus it's easier to learn and does better graphics. Active user support network. It's worth getting Peter Dalgaard's book Introductory Statistics with R too.

• Perl. For all your data- munging needs (e.g., getting numbers from Praat into a form where R can read them).

• Java 2, a full-fledged general-purpose programming language, is useful for writing software to run experiments. It's extremely flexible; you can do adaptive methods, voice response, etc. etc. It's also (mostly) platform-independent: You can write an experiment-control program on, e.g., a Mac, and run it on, e.g., a Linux or Windows machine -- or even over the Web. (However, it is not adequate when events have to be timed precisely.)

• Scilab and Octave are freeware Matlab clones. Good for advanced signal processing and lots more.