In 2022 I audited my software subscriptions for the first time. The total was £14,000 a year across 31 active tools. Nine I had forgotten existed. Four were doing the same job. That audit is the reason fewertools exists. Three years later I run my whole business on 11 tools, which cost me roughly £92 a month. Here is the exact list, the prices, and the verdicts I actually hold today.
The original 31
The 2022 audit was a spreadsheet, eight columns wide, that I built in a single sitting on a Sunday afternoon. The columns: tool name, monthly cost, what I use it for, last time I used it, what I would use instead if it shut down, whether it had any data I cared about, whether I could export it, whether I had even logged into it in the last 90 days.
The numbers, in retrospect, were comedy. I was paying for:
- Three project management tools. Asana for client work, Notion for personal projects, Trello "for visual stuff." The reason was that I had tried each at different times and never cancelled the previous one.
- Four analytics tools across two projects. Google Analytics 4, Plausible, Fathom, and PostHog. I genuinely could not remember why I had subscribed to PostHog. I had no events instrumented.
- Two design tools. Figma I used; Sketch I had a paid licence for from 2019. Sketch was £99 a year for nothing.
- Two CRMs. HubSpot Starter I tried for a month and forgot to cancel. Pipedrive I actually used.
- A "video repository" tool whose name I no longer remember, that charged £14/month for 18 months while I never logged in once.
Total spend that month: £1,168. Annualised: £14,016. Useful subscriptions that month: 11. Effective cost per useful tool: ~£106 a month, which is fine. Cost of waste: £680 a month, which is not.
The cuts
The first audit took 90 minutes. The cancellations took longer because two vendors had buried the cancel flow inside a chat with sales and one was on annual billing that I had to wait six months to walk away from. £14K compresses to £4.8K within 90 days; it took the full year to hit the floor.
What I actually run today, in 2026
Three years and a lot of failed switches later, this is the actual stack. Names, prices, opinions. No affiliate bias on the cuts: where I cancelled a tool I will be honest about why.
| Tool | Monthly | What for | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Pro | £16 | Writing, thinking, research | Top Pick |
| Cursor Pro | £16 | Code, code review | Top Pick |
| Vercel Pro | £16 | Hosting fewertools.com | Recommended |
| Notion Plus | £8 | Project notes, draft writing | Recommended |
| Linear | £8 | Solo backlog | Top Pick |
| Supabase | £0 | Backend, auth, the stack registry | Top Pick |
| Plausible | £7 | Site analytics | Recommended |
| Beehiiv | £0 | The Drop newsletter | Recommended |
| Cal.com Pro | £11 | Scheduling | Recommended |
| 1Password | £3 | Secrets | Recommended |
| Resend | £0 | Transactional email | Recommended |
| Total | £92 |
The cost is conspicuously lower than 2022 because three of the eleven are on free tiers I have not yet outgrown (Supabase, Beehiiv, Resend), and because most of the tools I run today have a single £16/month plan as their flagship. The 2022 stack was structurally more expensive because the average tool charged for collaboration features I did not need.
What I cut and would not bring back
Asana (£21/month, gone)
I used Asana for client project tracking. I cancelled it when I switched to Linear, which was originally a developer-focused tool but works fine for a solo founder's full backlog. Asana's pricing climbed twice in the period I was using it, and the workflow features I cared about were behind the Premium tier. Linear is faster, prettier, and cheaper. The switch took four hours for a small project list.
HubSpot Starter (£42/month, gone)
I signed up to try the marketing automation, found it heavier than I needed, and forgot to cancel for six months. HubSpot's product is real; the problem was that it is structurally built for sales teams, not solo founders. For 1-to-N email I now use Beehiiv, for 1-to-1 outreach I use plain Gmail with a couple of shortcuts. If I ever need a real CRM, I will use Attio.
Mailchimp (£28/month, gone)
This was the most expensive newsletter platform I have ever used and it offered fewer growth features than Beehiiv at half the price. The blocker for switching for me was not technical; it was domain reputation. I warmed up the new sending domain over three weeks of small batches before I cut over. The full switch guide is here.
Fathom Analytics (£14/month, gone)
I genuinely like Fathom. It is built by indie founders for indie founders. I cancelled only because I already had Plausible and could not justify both. If you do not have either, Fathom is the cleaner of the two in 2026 in my opinion. If you have Plausible, do not stack Fathom on top.
Trello (£10/month, gone in 2023)
Atlassian acquired Trello in 2017. The product is technically the same; Power-Ups got more aggressively monetised in 2023. I left to Notion's board view, which is sufficient for my use case. Switch took 90 minutes.
What I added since 2022
Cursor (£16/month)
This is the single most valuable subscription I have. Code review, refactor, rubber-duck debugging, occasional whole-feature scaffolding. The pricing changed unfavourably in mid-2025 (the credit pool model was confusing for several months) but has stabilised. I am not on Pro+ at £60/month; Pro at £20 is fine for solo founder workload.
Linear (£8/month)
The exception that proves the "don't pay for project management at solo-founder scale" rule. Linear is fast enough and pretty enough that I will pay for it even though Notion would technically do the job. The cost of friction in the tool you open 20 times a day is real, and Linear has none.
Cal.com (£11/month)
I tried Calendly for years and ended up on Cal.com because the founder-friendly pricing, open-source approach, and embedded availability link in my email signature all clicked. The product is genuinely good. Pricing is reasonable. Sign up via my link if you want.
What I keep almost-buying and stop
This is the most important section. The audit muscle is not "what tools did I cancel three years ago." It is "what tools do I almost subscribe to every quarter, and why do I stop." A short list:
An "AI second brain" tool
Every six months Mem, Tana, Reflect, or a new entrant catches my eye and I think "this time I'll switch from Notion." Every time I open Notion the same day, find the project I was looking for in under 20 seconds, and remember that the friction of "I can't find anything in Notion" is mostly me being lazy about tagging, not Notion's failure. The smart move is to do the tagging in Notion, not switch the tool.
A scheduling-and-CRM-and-everything tool
Things like Attio, Folk, Reform every now and then. I do not have enough leads to justify a CRM. When I do, Folk is my pick. Until then, the four people who have written me cold-emails this quarter live in a Notion page. That works.
A retention or analytics-AI tool
The Flywheels, the Vitally, the Heaps. These are real products. They are also built for SaaS at £5K+ MRR with retention worth optimising. A bootstrapped site that does not sell a subscription product yet does not have a retention problem to optimise.
The most useful question is not "should I get this tool" but "what is the smallest stage at which this tool obviously pays for itself." If the answer is "later than where I am now," the right move is to bookmark the tool and revisit when revenue or operational complexity actually justifies it.
The lessons three years in
1. The audit pays for itself within 60 days
Anyone who has not done a SaaS audit in the last 12 months almost certainly has at least three "I forgot about that" subscriptions. The dollar value alone justifies 90 minutes once a year. I have done this audit every December since 2022. It always finds at least £200-£300 a month I had stopped paying attention to.
2. Tier-creep is real and slow
Tools you signed up for on a £8/seat plan have, in the time you have been using them, quietly moved features you depend on into a £18/seat tier. Notion did this in 2025. Slack and Loom followed in 2026. I wrote the bundling trap about this pattern specifically. The defensive move is annual audits, not switching every time.
3. Founder-led pricing is more stable
Looking back at my own 31, the tools that raised prices most aggressively were the PE-owned ones (Atlassian's Jira, Intuit's Mailchimp), and the tools that were stable for years were founder-led indies (Plausible, Cal.com, Resend). This is now a published pattern in our Switch Index 2026, but I lived it first as a customer.
4. The expensive switches are the ones I did not plan
Of the five biggest tool migrations I have done since 2022, the three I planned took half the time of the two I did not. The unplanned ones cost weekends I never got back. Now I plan every switch on a single Notion page with the data export step, the parallel-run window, and the rollback condition before I touch the new tool.
5. The audit is more useful than the choice
Most people obsess about picking the right tool. The bigger lever is auditing the tools you already have. Picking the right tool saves you 10% over a wrong-but-close-enough pick. Cancelling the four tools you forgot you subscribed to saves you 30%.
Use this story
Three concrete moves if any of this resonates:
- Open your last credit card statement and circle every subscription line. Anything you cannot immediately remember why you signed up for is a candidate to cancel today.
- For each remaining tool, write the date it was last useful. Anything older than 90 days that is not strategic infrastructure is also a candidate.
- Run the audit through fewertools. Paste your stack into our free stack audit. It compares against the 1,600+ tools in our catalog, flags overlap, and tells you which alternatives are cheaper.
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The £29 Blueprint is the upgraded version of the free audit. Same input, but you get a step-by-step plan: which exact tools to cut, what to swap them for, integration order, and the £/month you'd save in the first quarter.
Get the Blueprint · £29 →What I expect to change in 2027
Three tools on the current list are on the cancel-watch:
- Notion. If the bundling continues and I am paying £18 for AI I rarely use, I will downgrade. The fact that Claude is already on a separate subscription means most of Notion AI's value is double-paid in my stack.
- Cursor. Not because of the product but because of the open-source pressure (Cline, OpenHands, Goose). I expect by mid-2027 a free local agent will be 80% as good for solo founder workloads.
- Beehiiv. If The Drop subscriber count crosses 2,500 and the free tier ends, I will reassess against Buttondown and Kit. Beehiiv's growth tooling is good but most of it is for newsletters at the 10K+ stage.
None of these are urgent. All three are on a calendar reminder for review at year-end. That is the structural change three years of doing this has installed: every tool has a planned review window, and I do not panic-switch in March because of one bad week with the product.
If you want a second pair of eyes on your stack, the free stack audit uses the same logic. Paste, score, see what to cut, see what to keep.