Your AI Stack Is Probably One Tool Too Many
I audited my own subscriptions and found three tools doing the job of one. The savings were not just money, they were the cognitive tax of remembering which app does what.
I counted my AI subscriptions the other week and the number embarrassed me. For a solo operator the count was high, and when I mapped what each one actually did, three of them were quietly covering the same ground: draft, summarize, search. I was not paying for capability, I was paying for the rituals of switching between tabs.
The trap is the demo. Every tool shows its best five seconds and you buy the feeling, not the function. Six months later you have a drawer of apps you open once a month and a bill that reflects the drawer. The cost is not only the money, it is the overhead of remembering which tool does which job, and that overhead is a tax you pay on every task.
The test I now use is simple: can I name the one job this tool does that nothing else does? If the answer is it summarizes, like the other two, it goes. The tools that stayed were the ones with a lane no other held, the one that reads my private docs, the one that renders the video, the one that runs the workflow. Everything that overlapped got cut, and the work got faster, not slower.
There is a real risk in over-trimming, of course. A tool you use once a quarter for a specific job may still earn its place if that job is painful enough, so I keep a small rare but essential shelf and accept the cost. The point is not zero tools, it is no redundant ones, because redundancy is where the money and the mental load both leak.
If you do this, do it quarterly, not never. The stack that made sense in March is bloated by August, because every launch adds a tab and none of them remove one. Spend an afternoon with the test, cut the overlap, and the weird reward is a calmer workday where the tool you open is the tool you meant to open.