Was paying $684/mo across eleven tools. Went through them one at a time, cancelled anything I had not opened in 30 days, and replaced three with scripts. Now $196/mo and I have lost nothing I can measure.
Kept
- Rank tracker — $49. The only number I check daily
- One crawler — $99. Irreplaceable for technical work
- Proxy pool — $48. Everything else depends on it
Cancelled and replaced with ~60 lines of Python each
- SERP scraper at $89/mo. Now a script plus proxy cost of about $4/mo
- Keyword grouper at $79/mo. The clustering sheet I posted in Downloads does the same job
- Backlink monitor at $59/mo. A cron job and a diff
Cancelled and not replaced at all
Content optimiser ($99), AI writer ($69), social scheduler ($39), one all-in-one suite ($140) that duplicated four of the others.
The honest part
The scripts cost me about 14 hours to write and they break roughly monthly. At my rate that is not obviously a win. The real saving was the four tools I cancelled and never thought about again, which is $347/mo for nothing.
If you only do one thing: list every subscription with the date you last opened it.
while(true) { automate(); }