End of Q4 cleanup. I went through every recurring software bill and asked "do we use this every week, and would replacing it cost more than keeping it." Anything that failed both got cut.
What survived.
Notion for internal docs, client wikis, project tracking. We tried ClickUp and Asana, both fine, neither worth switching for.
Slack for comms. Not exciting, just consistent.
Gmail and Google Workspace for email and calendars. We're a Google shop because everyone we hire already knows it.
Stripe for payments. Boring choice that has never given us a problem.
Gamma for client decks, internal presentations, proposal one-pagers. Replaced two designers' worth of work per month at a cost of $20/seat. The output is good enough for 80% of what we send out and it's fast.
Claude for most of our writing first drafts, brainstorming, some research. We pay for Pro per person on the team.
Zoom for calls. Tried Google Meet for 4 months, kept hitting the limit at the wrong times.
Calendly for scheduling. Anything that handles scheduling properly is worth $12/month.
QuickBooks for books. Hated it for a year, accepted it.
What got cut. Buffer (replaced by direct posting), Otter (replaced by Granola), a CRM I won't name (replaced by a Notion database with views), Loom (we just send Zoom recordings now), a project management tool (Notion absorbed it), three writing assistants (Claude absorbed all of them).
Total monthly software cost dropped from roughly $640 to $390 across our 4-person team. The hours saved by not switching contexts between redundant tools is harder to measure but it's real.
The lesson, if I have one: every tool feels essential when you're using it. Most of them are essential to a workflow you could do differently. The 9 tools above are the ones I cannot reasonably do without. The other 5 were just expensive habits.