Add Up What You Pay for Software Every Month. Most Owners Are Wrong.

This one costs you ten minutes and I get nothing out of it. Do it anyway.

The exercise

Open your business bank statement or card statement for last month. Go through it line by line and write down every charge that is software. Not the ones you remember. The ones that are there.

Include the annual ones, divided by twelve. Include anything with a per-user or per-seat charge. Include the thing your bookkeeper set up. Include the one that renews on a card that is not the one you check.

Add it up. Then multiply by twelve.

That second number is the one worth sitting with.

What people find

Four things come up over and over, and none of them mean anyone was careless.

Tools nobody opens. Bought for a specific reason, the reason ended, the charge did not. Small ones survive longest precisely because they are small enough not to notice.

Two tools doing one job. Usually because two different people each solved the same problem, at different times, without talking.

Seats for people who left. Per-user pricing bills the seat, not the person. Nothing tells you when one goes quiet.

The tier you got moved into. You signed up on one plan. A feature you use got reclassified, or a limit got lowered, and you are now on a higher one. The email announcing it was read by nobody.

Then ask the second question

For everything left, the ones you actually use, ask:

How much of this am I using?

There is a common pattern where a business pays for a platform because of one thing it does, and does all the rest of its work somewhere else. That is not necessarily wrong. It is worth knowing.

What this has to do with me

I build software that businesses own outright, so I have an obvious interest in you being annoyed by your monthly bill. I would rather be straight about it.

Doing this exercise will probably not lead you to me. Most of the time what it produces is a few cancellations and a smaller bill, and you should just take that and get on with your day. That is a good outcome and it costs you nothing.

The case where it does lead somewhere else is when the total is large, it has been climbing, and the tools still do not fit how you work, so somebody is doing the same manual step every week to bridge the gap. Paying monthly, forever, to be slightly wrong is the situation worth doing something about.

If that is you, what a build costs is published, broken out piece by piece, so you can compare it against your annual number yourself without talking to anybody.

And if it is not you, cancel the three things nobody opens and keep the money.