What I pay for
Every subscription that runs the operation, what each one is actually for, and the ones I killed. Cost is shown in bands rather than amounts — the useful information is the shape of the spend, not my invoice.
- 16
- Active
- 15
- Cancelled
- 31
- Tracked
Software spend is the easiest thing in a one-person business to let drift. Everything looks justified at signup and almost nothing gets audited afterwards, so the honest test isn't whether a tool is good — it's whether I'd re-buy it today, at full price, knowing what I know now. More things have failed that test than currently pass it.
Building this page taught me something slightly embarrassing about my own tracker. It has a column headed Why? for recording the reason a subscription got cancelled. In several years of use I have never once filled it in — not on a single row. So the cancellations below are honest about what went and when, and mostly silent on why, because I'd rather leave a gap than reconstruct a plausible reason after the fact. The column is now the one thing on this page I'm actually committed to fixing.
On the card right now, and earning it.
- ClaudeActive
The daily driver. Claude Code is where nearly all the work happens — writing, building, deploying, research, and every custom command in the library.
The single largest line on the card and the least questionable. Everything else is downstream of it.
AI$100+ - ChatGPTActive
Second opinion and image generation. Free tier only.
The paid plan went in 2023 once Claude became the default. Kept on free for the occasional cross-check.
AIFree - ElevenLabsActive
Voice generation for content and the voice-agent fleet.
Downgraded from a higher tier to starter. The cheap plan covers what I actually do with it.
AIUnder $20 - LeonardoActive
AI image generation for blog covers and content visuals.
AIUnder $20 - SemrushActive
Keyword research, competitor visibility and rank tracking across the client sites and my own.
SEONot yet tracked - Local FalconActive
Geo-grid rank tracking for local businesses — shows where a listing actually ranks street by street rather than as one city-wide number.
SEONot yet tracked - NotionActive
Structured records — content databases, CRM, planning. The half of the knowledge system that markdown is bad at.
ProductivityUnder $20 - LinearActive
Issue tracking for client delivery and for deferred decisions — anything gated on a condition that hasn't fired yet goes here rather than into a note.
ProductivityNot yet tracked - Google WorkspaceActive
Email, Drive, Docs and Sheets. The default surface for anything client-facing.
ProductivityUnder $20 - GoHighLevelActive
CRM, pipelines and client-facing automation for the agency side.
CRM$100+ - SonotelActive
VoIP line for business calls.
CommsUnder $20 - CanvaActive
Social posts, covers and brand assets — anything where speed beats precision.
DesignUnder $20 - CapCutActive
The only video editor I use. One reusable base template cloned per video rather than editing each from scratch.
Chosen over the AI auto-editors deliberately — at my volume they solve a problem I don't have.
VideoUnder $20 - ContentdripsActive
Templated social graphics and scheduling.
Content$20–50 - MediumActive
Membership, for cross-posting essays to a different audience than the one that reads here.
ContentAnnual - HeyGenActive
AI avatar video — presenter-style video without filming it.
Second run at this. I paid for it in early 2025, cancelled it, and came back once the use case was actually clear rather than merely interesting. Some tools are right eventually — the mistake was buying it the first time on curiosity.
VideoNot yet tracked
More tools than I currently run. Every one looked justified at signup. A few have a note against them; most don't, for the reason above.
- Wispr FlowCancelled
Voice-to-text. Most of what I put into Claude Code is dictated rather than typed.
Replaced by Handy, a free open-source app that transcribes on my own laptop. Less accurate on names, good enough when the reader is Claude.
Productivity— - Relevance AICancelled
No-code AI agent builder.
Superseded by writing the agents directly. The no-code layer became the constraint rather than the shortcut.
AI— - WriteSonicCancelled
AI writing and content generation.
AI— - NeuronWriterCancelled
AI-assisted SEO content optimisation.
SEO— - MangoolsCancelled
SEO keyword research toolset.
SEO— - Steve.aiCancelled
AI video generation from scripts.
Video— - MojoCancelled
Templated social video and reels.
Video— - Open ArtCancelled
AI image generation.
Replaced by Leonardo. Two tools doing one job for a while, which is how most of this list starts.
AI— - PixlrCancelled
Browser-based image editing.
Design— - BufferCancelled
Social scheduling.
Content— - LinkedIn Sales NavigatorCancelled
Prospecting and lead search.
Sales— - n8n CloudCancelled
Managed hosting for the automation layer.
Moved to self-hosted on my own server. Same software, a fraction of the cost, and I understand it far better for having wired it up myself.
Automation— - ElestioCancelled
Managed server hosting.
Consolidated onto a single VPS running everything under Docker.
Hosting— - NetjetCancelled
Hosting-adjacent service.
On the list, cancelled, and I genuinely cannot remember what it did. Which is its own kind of answer.
Hosting— - Microsoft 365Cancelled
Office apps and cloud storage.
Overlapped almost entirely with Google Workspace at several times the cost, and survived years of audits on habit alone. The most expensive thing on this list and the last to go, which is usually the order.
Productivity—
Everything I've actually used
Different question to the one above. That list is what's on the card right now. This is every app and extension I've put hands on — most of them free, plenty of them abandoned, a few used exactly once.
It's here because the breadth is the actual skill. Knowing eight ways to solve a problem and having formed an opinion on which one is worth reaching for is worth more than deep fluency in whichever tool you happened to learn first — and it's the part of a stack that never shows up on an invoice.
LLM
07Voice AI
06Coding
05Web development
09SEO
10Market research
08Operations
22Extensions
19Email marketing
07Sales
04X
06Video
09Design
09Presentations
02- Gamma
- Slide AI
Newsletter
03Scheduling
02Chatbots
05Forms
03Automation
02Scraping
01Databases
01DevOps
01Visual data
02Advertising
03- Markopolo AI
- Viewst
- Grapevine
Influencer marketing
03Courses & LMS
03Creator monetisation
02Testimonials
01- InstaSet
Meta ads
01- Koast AI
iOS
01This page is the money — what's on the card. How the infrastructure is actually wired together, and the rules that decide what runs where, is a different question and lives on the systems page. The client-facing demos of what I build with it all are under tools.