Before another word, one thing to get out of the way: I did not cancel these subscriptions. I never bought most of them. I just never started. So this isn't a post about money I got back. It's about a bill I never picked up, and I think that's the most useful version for most business owners. You probably haven't bought half of these either.
I'm not a coder or a developer. Every tool below got built by describing what I wanted in plain English to Claude.
| What I needed | The paid tool | List price |
|---|---|---|
| Sign, redact, and re-order PDFs | Acrobat Pro | $30 a month |
| A teleprompter | A paid teleprompter app | $10 a month |
| Find which videos in a niche are punching above their weight | vidIQ Boost | $19 a month |
| A personal VPN | NordVPN | $13 a month |
| Video editing and captioning | Descript Creator | $35 a month |
That's $107 a month at list price, or $1,284 a year.
The PDF tool signs, redacts, and re-orders, which is most of what a small business does with Acrobat. Acrobat does dozens of other things, like form building, PDF editing, and e-signature workflows with an audit trail. That is exactly why the whole subscription never made sense for me.
I did not rebuild any of those products. Acrobat has hundreds of features and I use four. vidIQ has a whole dashboard and I look at one part. Descript does a dozen things and I do one.
Every tool I built is just my corner of somebody else's app. That is why this is possible for someone who doesn't write code. Building a competitor is hard. Building the 20 minutes of the product you personally touch is a weekend.
Take Acrobat Pro at $30 a month. Here is how I think about it in plain terms. I sign, redact, and re-order PDFs. That is four features out of hundreds. I can describe each one in a sentence: "put my signature on this page," "black out this text so it cannot be read," "move page 7 to the front." Anything I can describe in a sentence is something Claude can build for me, and I can check by trying it on a real file before I trust it.
Now compare that to a team that edits PDFs all day, builds forms, and needs an audit trail on every signature. They cannot describe their use of Acrobat in a sentence, because they use all of it. For them, $30 a month is cheap. The same logic runs through the other four: a teleprompter is one screen, a niche-outlier finder is one report, a VPN is one switch, and my captioning need is one job.
Free isn't the right word. There's time, and every one of these cost me evenings. If your hourly rate is high and you actually use all of Acrobat, go buy Acrobat.
This math works when three things are true:
If you own a business, the question changes a little. Your time is what you're spending. The real question is whether it's you spending the evenings, or whether it makes more sense to pay someone who has already made the mistakes to do it faster. Both are legitimate answers, and neither is free.
Pull up last month's card statement and circle every software line under $100 a month. For each one, ask two questions:
If the honest answer is one screen or one report, that's a candidate. If the honest answer is "we use most of it every day," leave it alone. If your team lives inside all of Acrobat's features, buying it is the right call.
This isn't a post telling you to build everything yourself. It's a post telling you to ask the question before you keep paying for the whole thing out of habit.
Some bills should just stay. Keep paying when:
Build a small version when the tool is expensive, you touch one corner of it, and you will be at the computer anyway.
I spent years assuming this kind of thing was locked behind a degree I don't have. The lock was mostly knowing how to ask the right question about what you already pay for.
Whatever gets built runs on your own accounts, and you keep it. It isn't something you rent from me.
Comment the one software bill on your card you'd cut first, just the category. The process I use to decide what to build is Forge on GitHub.
If you're not sure where to start, read Your Team Complains About One Task Every Week. Start There With AI..
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Free. Unsubscribe anytime.I'm a marketer who builds his own tools. More at adamgarceau.com.