--- title: "I cancelled seventeen SaaS subscriptions in two weeks. Four months later I haven't gone back to a single one" url: "https://www.mikefluff.com/en/blog/saas-audit-2026" locale: "en" author: "Mike Fluff" updated: "2026-05-02" description: "In January, accounting showed me $9,760 a year in software. I opened a list of twenty-two subscriptions and cancelled seventeen. What I cut, what stayed, and why." tags: - "tools" - "money" - "stack" alternates: - locale: "en" url: "https://www.mikefluff.com/en/blog/saas-audit-2026" markdown: "https://www.mikefluff.com/en/blog/saas-audit-2026.md" - locale: "ru" url: "https://www.mikefluff.com/ru/blog/saas-audit-2026" markdown: "https://www.mikefluff.com/ru/blog/saas-audit-2026.md" - locale: "pt" url: "https://www.mikefluff.com/pt/blog/saas-audit-2026" markdown: "https://www.mikefluff.com/pt/blog/saas-audit-2026.md" - locale: "es" url: "https://www.mikefluff.com/es/blog/saas-audit-2026" markdown: "https://www.mikefluff.com/es/blog/saas-audit-2026.md" --- # I cancelled seventeen SaaS subscriptions in two weeks. Four months later I haven't gone back to a single one > **In short:** I tagged each of 22 subscriptions as opened this week, this month or not at all, cancelled the nine I never opened and the four I had forgotten, and four more after a two-week test. Cursor, Claude Pro, the Anthropic API, Notion and Vercel stayed, at $1,680 a year instead of $9,760. General AI models had replaced Grammarly, Otter and Notion AI. In January 2026 our accounting team sent the annual expense report — the usual thing, end of fiscal period, taxes, all that. I scrolled through it. Page three: the "Software & Subscriptions" line. Total: **$9,760**. Nine thousand seven hundred sixty dollars a year on tools that I — one human in one small company — use to do my job. That's $813 a month. For comparison, that's **more than I pay for rent** in one of the cities where my team and I worked over the last two years. I opened a spreadsheet, sat down, and listed every subscription. Came out to **eighteen active**, plus four I'd forgotten to cancel (including one at $39 a month I hadn't touched since last May — a separate kind of pain). Then I did what I'd been meaning to: tagged each subscription with one of three labels — "opened this week", "opened this month", "haven't opened at all". Opened this week — five. Opened this month — four. Haven't opened — nine. Thirteen went that evening: the nine I never opened and the four I had forgotten. Four more two weeks later, after a short "what if I was wrong" test. Out of those seventeen, **I have not gone back to a single one in four months**. --- First, the ones I cut, and why. The point isn't that the tools are bad. Most of them are excellent. The point is that **I had stopped using the function** I subscribed for. And the shift happened quietly, in the background. **Calendly Pro, $20/mo.** Subscribed two years ago when I was doing 8 meetings a day. Now I do 2-3, and Cal.com (free, open source) covers them with room to spare. Minus $240/year. Nobody noticed. **Grammarly Premium, $30/mo.** A separate story. I still write in three languages, and Grammarly was once indispensable for English. But in 2026 I drop in a piece of text and ask Claude to clean it up — works better, because Claude reads **meaning**, not just grammar. Grammarly went invisible. Minus $360/year. **Otter.ai Premium, $20/mo.** Call transcription. Stopped using it the moment it became clear that after a call it's better to **scribble five bullets myself** than read a thirty-minute transcript that's 95% filler. Transcription helps when you weren't on the call. If you were — it hurts. Minus $240/year. **Mixpanel, $40/mo.** Analytics for one of my sites. Switched to free Plausible because I needed exactly three numbers — visitors, sources, path. Mixpanel is a powerful tool for a team making Big Product Decisions. I have no Big Product Decisions right now. I have three numbers. Minus $480/year. **Loom Pro, $15/mo.** Video messages. Stopped recording, because **nobody watches** video messages longer than 90 seconds, and free Loom caps at five minutes — which is more than enough for me in 2026. Minus $180/year. **Webflow, $39/mo.** Separate story — I had one landing page hosted there. Rewrote it in Next.js in half a day (Cursor did the heavy lifting) and moved to Vercel. Minus $468/year, plus $0 for hosting. **HubSpot Starter, $50/mo.** CRM. Realised that at any given time I have 8-12 clients in the active pipeline, and HubSpot for that is a tank for crushing ants. Moved to a single Notion table. Minus $600/year. **Buffer, $15/mo.** Social posting. Realised my "content strategy" is "when something gets written, I publish it". I don't need a scheduler — I need to press "publish". Minus $180/year. **Pitch, $10/mo.** Slides. I had two pitches last year. Made the slides in Figma and exported to PDF. Minus $120/year. **Notion AI, $10/mo.** Subscribed a year ago out of curiosity. Used it exactly three times since, because **I already have Claude**, and walking over to AI in a different window is one extra step. Minus $120/year. **Linear, an extra workspace seat, $8/mo.** Pure admin debt. Minus $96/year. **Figma Editor seat, $15/mo.** Stopped designing in Figma — restructured the process so I look in viewer mode (free) and the designer touches the file. Minus $180/year. The twelve listed above come to **$3,264 a year**. The remaining five weighed more: another $4,816. --- > **The subscription pattern** > > My guess is that a third of the SaaS subscriptions on the average > founder's card belong to the "used to be needed" category. Not "broken". > Not "bad". Just **the role is gone**, the subscription stayed. That's > not a flaw — it's natural. But it's worth checking once a year, no less. --- What stayed — five tools I live in every day. Each one and the reason it doesn't get cut. **Cursor, $20/mo.** Code editor with built-in AI. This is my main tool. I open it daily. I write not just code in it, but a serious chunk of text (this post included). Alternatives exist, but I'd pay $40 or $60 for Cursor. Not advertising — **diagnosis**. **Claude Pro, $20/mo.** Chats with the model. Mostly used for editing, parsing long documents, prepping for meetings. I tried living on the API alone once — didn't work, because the chat interface is faster when the question is unstructured. **Anthropic API, ~$70/mo.** This is for everything that's automated — handling emails, generating responses, classifying tasks. It's **fuel**. Pay-as-you-go, never been excessive. Last year I paid more — switched to smaller models for routine work, the bill dropped by a third. **Notion, $10/mo.** Documents, notes, tables, weak CRM. One person, one workspace, zero appetite for complication. Notion in 2026 is **the place where all my written memory lives**. Nothing replaces it. **Vercel, $20/mo.** Hosting for all my sites and tools. Cheaper alternatives exist. I checked — savings of $5-10 a month, hours a year lost on configuration. Not worth it. Total: $140/mo = $1,680/year. It used to be $9,760. Savings — **$8,080 a year**. In place of that money I now have a simple operation: I know what I'm paying for every month and can describe each line in a single sentence. That, as it turns out, is a **rare state** for a founder in 2026. --- Three non-obvious takeaways I pulled out of this exercise. **One.** Most SaaS tools are **specialised for a workflow you've already changed**. Calendly is great when you do 8 meetings a day. HubSpot is great when you have 200 leads in the pipeline. Webflow is great when you don't have a developer and you're making landing pages. If your process changed and the tool stayed — it runs on inertia, not utility. **Two.** AI **swallowed** a serious slice of niche SaaS. Grammarly, Otter, Notion AI — these are all "specialised models" from an era when the general model didn't cope. In 2026 the general model copes. Not perfectly, but — **enough** to save three specialised subscriptions. **Three.** Subscriptions "for $10 a month" are the most dangerous category. Easy to approve, easy to forget, easy to stack a dozen. When you have twelve subscriptions at $10 each, that's $1,440 a year, and each one in isolation feels like nothing. I now look at new subscriptions in annual money. "That's $120 a year" is a different conversation than "that's $10 a month". --- > **Simple protocol** > > Once a quarter — list every subscription. One pass. One label per > subscription: "opened this week" / "opened this month" / "haven't > opened". The third category shouldn't exist. If it does — cancel the > same evening, before you change your mind. --- I now keep this list in Notion (where else, of course). Run through it once a quarter. In April I cut two more — a Google rank tracker and an SSL monitor (a cron job handles it for free). Down to three. Four, actually — I added a new one for one specific task that neither Claude nor Cursor could really handle. Good subscriptions are **working tools**. Bad subscriptions are **an archive of intentions** you pay for every month. A year of not separating them is $8,000 of archive that needs to go. **[Audit your stack](https://www.mikefluff.com/en#contact)** — If you want to look at your subscriptions and aren't sure which ones you actually need — come over. An hour, a spreadsheet, a conversation. Usually ends in 30-50% savings and a clarity worth more than the money.