The AI subscription stack nobody audits

By Anwar Benhamada · August 6, 2026

AI tools are individually cheap and collectively expensive. Twenty dollars doesn’t trigger the part of your brain that evaluates spending, so subscriptions accumulate one at a time and nobody ever looks at the total.

Here’s a thirty-minute audit. It usually finds a third to a half is recoverable.

Step 1: get the actual list

Not from memory — you’ll miss several. Search your email for “receipt”, “subscription”, and “your plan” over the last six months, or check your card statement for recurring charges.

Write down every one with its monthly cost and annualise it. The annual total is the number that changes behaviour; the monthly one is the number that let it happen.

Step 2: mark each one honestly

Three buckets:

• Used this week — genuinely in the workflow
• Used this month — real but occasional
• Haven’t opened it in 30 days — you’re paying rent on a login

The third bucket is usually bigger than expected, and it’s almost always tools bought during an enthusiastic week that never made it into a habit.

Step 3: find the overlaps

This is where the money is. The categories that quietly duplicate:

• Writing — your coding assistant, your general chat tool, and your dedicated writing tool all write. You need one.
• Transcription — often already included in your video editor and your meeting tool
• Image generation — increasingly bundled into design tools you already pay for
• Search/research — the general chat tools now do this natively

Ask of each: if this vanished tomorrow, which other tool I already pay for would I use instead? If the answer comes quickly, you’ve found a cancellation.

Step 4: check what the free tier does

Several of these tools have free tiers covering the volume you actually use. Paying for a plan that gives you 10× your usage is common — and vendors have no incentive to tell you.

Look at your usage against the free tier’s limit. If you’re at 20% of the paid allowance and the free tier covers 50%, that’s a free downgrade.

Step 5: the annual-plan trap

Annual saves 20%. It also means twelve months of a tool you might stop using in month three — which, in a category moving this fast, is a real risk rather than a theoretical one.

Reasonable rule for AI tools specifically: pay monthly for the first six months. The category turns over fast enough that today’s obvious choice is frequently replaced within a year, and the 20% is cheap insurance against that.

The recurring version

Put a recurring calendar entry every quarter. Ten minutes:

• Anything unopened in 30 days → cancel
• Anything duplicated → keep one
• Anything at under 25% of its plan’s limit → downgrade

Nothing here is clever. It just requires someone to look, and by design nobody ever does.