I listed every tool I pay for this week. Took an hour. Some I hadn't opened in months. One I genuinely could not explain. Close to $1k/month, and I could only confidently defend about half of it.
Today:
• the three buckets every tool in your stack belongs in
• $500+ in cuts sitting in plain sight
• the tool that should have caught this six months ago
• a free Notion setup that makes this a 15-minute habit
The three buckets — and why the third one is the expensive one
Active, revenue-connected, irreplaceable right now. Keep without question.
You're learning something, finishing a build, onboarding a client. Keep it — but set a hard cancel date.
Can't immediately justify it. Cut or put it on a 30-day clock to prove its worth.
Most software audits fail because people treat it as a binary: keep or cut. That's not how spending actually works.
When I ran my own stack through this, the dead weight was obvious fast. A writing platform I hadn't opened in weeks. A task manager running alongside a free tool that does the same thing. A newsletter platform I was paying for before publishing a single issue. Gone in one conversation.
The time-boxed stuff is where money quietly disappears. A cert course. A builder I used for a launch and forgot to cancel. None of those are wrong — but none had a cancel date. That's how $250/month becomes $3k/year for something you finished in month two.
The rule: any time-boxed tool gets a calendar reminder set before you close the tab. Not when you “feel done.” The date goes in now.
Run yours through these three buckets and reply with what you find →
The tool you’re probably paying for twice
One pattern in my own stack: paying for a standalone tool that does one thing, when a platform I'm already on added that same feature months ago. AI writing add-ons. Basic scheduling. Simple CRM views. A lot of this is bundled now. Check your existing platforms before you renew anything single-purpose.
Reply with the tool — I’ll tell you if there’s a free version already in your stack →
What’s still billing you that you forgot about
Posted a version of this audit in a small business group. Most common reply: people finding annual subscriptions they'd completely forgotten — one guy had a $400/year SEO tool he hadn't touched since 2023. If you have one, reply. I want to know what it was.
Notion — free, and better than the tool you’re paying for
Notion's free tier is genuinely good. Unlimited pages, databases, linked views. One database with four columns — tool, cost, bucket, cancel date — filtered to “time-boxed” every Sunday. That's the whole system. If you're paying for a separate task manager or lightweight CRM, Notion probably replaces it for $0.
→ Ramp gives real-time visibility into every subscription on your card — free for small teams
→ Most SaaS tools will pause your account for a month if you ask before cancelling
→ Annual billing saves 15–20% — only worth it if the tool is load-bearing
→ The average SMB spends $1,200/yr on software it doesn’t actively use
→ Free tiers across most tools have improved significantly in the last 18 months — check the pricing page
That's it. I cut $120/month in one sitting. The other $500 is still on the table — I just need to make a few decisions. You probably have the same problem.
— Kris
P.S. What’s the most embarrassing tool still billing you? Reply — best answer gets a mention next issue.
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