Build your tower
Tick tools on and off — each becomes a block, sized by price. Red blocks overlap in function with another checked tool. Drag the tower to rotate it.
Why each one "felt cheap"
Pennies-a-day framing
$20/month reads as "two coffees." Behavioral economists call this the peanuts effect: small recurring amounts escape the mental accounting that a single $1,200/yr invoice would trigger. Subscriptions are priced to stay under your audit threshold.
Overlap is the real waste
The typical AI stack duplicates capability: a chat subscription, an IDE agent, and API credits can all draft code; a transcription tool and a meeting-notes tool both transcribe. Audit rule: for each job, keep the one tool you'd repurchase today, cancel the rest for 30 days, and see what you actually miss.
The consolidation math
A $200/month stack is $2,400/yr — $13,800 over five years if invested at 7% instead. Consolidating to one $20 frontier-chat plan plus ~$30 of raw API usage covers most solo workflows at $600/yr: a 75% cut with, for many people, zero felt loss. The savings aren't in negotiating price; they're in deleting overlap.
When the stack IS worth it
If a $200 stack saves a freelancer five billable hours a month at $60/hr, it returns $300 on $200 — keep it. The audit isn't anti-tool; it's per-tool: each line item must beat both its substitutes and the invested alternative. "Cheap on its own" is never the test.