It took about a month. Boss One sat down with a stack of tax records — one for each business he runs — and read out, item by item, what each had been paying for. There were quite a few items. Most of them were small. Some of them were not. A few of them, on inspection, were paying for nothing at all.
The conclusion was uncomplicated: money was going out of the door in directions Boss One had stopped paying attention to, and there were two reasonable things to do about it. The first was to stop the leak. The second — which surprised both of us — was to use the same hour to turn a different tap on.
A month later, we have cancelled, swapped or replaced approaching $15,000 a year in software subscriptions that were no longer earning their keep. We have also, more interestingly, started writing our own — and the new software, it turns out, has stopped costing us money. It has started making it. What follows is the running ledger.
The first half — what we stopped paying for
It went in three waves, easiest to hardest.
Stage 1 — Just cancel it
Some of the subscriptions were paying for absolutely nothing. Boss One had signed up, used the thing once, and forgotten it existed. The bill, however, had not forgotten him.
| What it was | Annual cost |
|---|---|
| Quiz lead magnet, returns qualified leads | $1,443 |
| Video avatar for content creation | $1,200 |
| Coding LLM | $700 |
| Learning piano subscription | $250 |
| SEO plugin | $190 |
| Cloud storage | $180 |
| …and several smaller ones | — |
| Total cancelled (so far) | ~$4,000 / year |
The lesson of stage one is depressing and useful: a sufficiently busy person can pay for things they barely use, sometimes for years.
Stage 2 — Swap it for something cheaper, or free
Some of the tools were genuinely needed; the question was whether the version Boss One was paying for was the right one. Most of them weren’t.
| What it was | Replaced with | Saved / year |
|---|---|---|
| Design Software (drawing, photos, page layout) | Affinity (now free) | $1,362 |
| Voice cloning, text to speech | Lower level plan | $1,340 |
| B-Roll creation for content creation | The same product, via its API | $600 |
| Total swapped | ~$3,300 / year |
A great deal of money lives in the gap between the tier a company wants you to be on, and the tier you actually need.
Stage 3 — Build the replacement
This is the surprising stage. Some of the tools we cancelled were not swapped for cheaper ones. They were replaced — by software that we wrote, for the exact thing we needed it to do.
The software is faster, because it does only one job. It does not bill us, because no one is sending us an invoice. And when it doesn’t do quite what we want, we change it.
| What it was | Replaced with | Saved / year |
|---|---|---|
| Lead Magnet (quiz platform) | A small custom WordPress plugin | $3,000 |
| Automation (workflows) | n8n, self-hosted | $650 |
| CRM (email and automation) | n8n + a few lines of code | $1,430 |
| Book Keeping – (in progress) | A custom Mac app | $1,710 |
| Total replaced | ~$6,800 / year |
A note on what this cost. Writing your own software is not free. The model bills did show up in the spreadsheet — a few hundred dollars a month for the language models that wrote, and more importantly kept writing, the code. We started small, on a modest plan; as the savings mounted, we increased the budget deliberately. Worth every cent. The whole project is, in essence, paying for the next stretch of itself. And when something breaks, we ask the same machines that built it to fix it. Usually they do, in seconds.
Not a Job for a Human
There is a phrase printed on Boss One’s office wall, in big letters: Not a Job for a Human.
It is the rule we apply now whenever we look at a piece of work. If the task is repetitive, mechanical, schedule-bound, or rewards information over judgement, it is not a job for a human. It is a job for software written for the purpose.
This is not, importantly, a story about replacing employees with AI. Boss One has none. The work in question is either work that doesn’t get done, or work that doesn’t exist yet. It is the story of what one person can now build that they could never have built before — not because they suddenly have help, but because the work that used to consume them should never have consumed a person at all.
The aim is abundance — without anyone to do the doing but us. Not because the work is unworthy of paid hands. Because most of it was never work for human hands in the first place. The hands are now free to make new things.
Sometimes the abundance is what we no longer spend. Sometimes it is what we now make.
The same rule, at a larger scale — Not a Job for a Human.
What replaced us
The loud example is the phone. Boss One used to answer it himself — which meant nobody answered it on a Sunday afternoon, at three in the morning, or in any of the languages Boss One does not happen to speak. A small AI receptionist now does. Every call. In any language. Several at a time, if it needs to. The number of answered calls has doubled. So has the revenue that came with them. Boss One got his evenings back.
Quieter than that
The receptionist is the loud example. There are a number of quieter ones, running in the background, that we have stopped thinking about.
Something writes thoughtful replies to customer reviews — in our voice, except faster. Something else handles the website chat, fluent in everything the business has ever written. Text messages — the ones we used to type out one by one — now go out automatically. A small fleet of dashboards reports each morning, noticing what we would not have noticed. Several of them have started improving themselves, quietly, between visits.
Boss One has stopped trying to keep a list. There is always something new on it. They are simply running, like the heating — and the work, somehow, is getting done.
And one more thing we keep finding
Every tool we have built for ourselves, lately, has turned out to be useful to somebody else. The quiz plugin is the obvious one — there are other people trying to teach things, who might like a quiz that does exactly the right job and does not bill them every month. The receptionist is another: there are other small businesses tied to a single phone. The bookkeeping app, when it lands, will be a third.
So every new piece of software now gets a quiet second question after the first one has been answered. Does this work for us? — and then — might this work for somebody else?
It changes what kind of company we are.