Last month, I finally did the thing I’d been avoiding for a year: auditing every AI-related subscription we were paying for.

The results were embarrassing.

The Discovery

Between our small team of five, we had:

• ChatGPT Plus (3 accounts)
• Claude Pro (2 accounts)
• Jasper (1 account, unused for six months)
• Copy.ai (1 account)
• Otter.ai (2 accounts)
• Fireflies.ai (1 account)
• Notion AI (team plan)
• Grammarly Business (team plan)

Total: roughly $650 per month. For five people.

The worst part? At least $400 of that was going to overlapping features or tools nobody was using.

The Overlaps

We had three separate AI writing tools. Jasper had been signed up for a specific marketing campaign that ended in July. Copy.ai was someone’s personal preference from before we had Notion AI. Nobody had cancelled anything because nobody was tracking it.

Otter.ai and Fireflies.ai do essentially the same thing—transcribe and summarise meetings. We had both because different team members signed up independently.

Multiple ChatGPT and Claude accounts because we hadn’t bothered setting up team access properly.

The Cleanup

Here’s what we actually kept:

• ChatGPT Team plan ($25/user/month for all five of us)
• Notion AI (already part of our workspace subscription)
• Otter.ai (slightly better for our use case than Fireflies)

That’s it. Everything else got cancelled.

New monthly spend: about $175. Savings: roughly $475/month, or $5,700 annually.

What We Learned

Nobody was tracking subscriptions. We’re a startup. Things move fast. People sign up for free trials, forget to cancel, expense it without scrutiny. Small amounts add up.

Features overlap massively. Most AI tools do some version of writing assistance. Most do some version of summarisation. Most have some chat interface. The differences are marginal for general use cases.

Team plans are almost always cheaper than individual accounts. Three ChatGPT Plus accounts cost $60/month. A Team plan for three people costs $75/month but includes better admin controls and shared features. For five people, the math gets even more obvious.

Free tiers are often enough. Grammarly’s free version catches 90% of what we need. The business plan’s AI features weren’t adding much value beyond what we got from Notion AI and ChatGPT.

The Audit Process

If you’re running a small business and haven’t done this recently, here’s the quick version:

1. Export your credit card and expense reports for the past six months
2. Search for every AI, ML, or writing-tool-sounding transaction
3. List them all, including who requested each and when
4. For each one, ask: “When did we last actually use this?”
5. For tools that are being used, ask: “Do we have another tool that does this too?”
6. Cancel everything that fails both questions
7. Consolidate overlapping tools

Took about two hours. Probably the highest-ROI two hours I’ve spent this quarter.

The Startup Tax

Small companies are particularly vulnerable to subscription sprawl. We don’t have procurement processes. We move fast and try things. That’s good for agility, bad for expense management.

If you’re a founder or run finance at a startup, put a quarterly subscription audit on your calendar. Not just AI tools—everything. But AI tools especially, because they’ve proliferated faster than anything I’ve seen since the SaaS explosion of the 2010s.

The $5,700 we’re saving goes directly to runway. That matters.