A stack grows by addition and never by subtraction.
Nobody sits down and decides to run nineteen subscriptions. You add one to solve a Tuesday, it works, and it never comes up again. The audit below is the subtraction step nobody schedules.
Nineteen line items. You could name maybe eight of them. Three renew next month and you will not notice, because they are all under forty dollars and none of them is worth the ten minutes it takes to cancel.
Eight tools, each with a job you can say out loud in one sentence. Anything you cannot finish that sentence for is cancelled by Friday.
What each one actually does here.
Named, with the job. A category is not information. Replace anything below with the equivalent you already pay for, the shape is what matters.
The stack audit.
Run this against your own list. Four questions per tool. Any tool that fails two gets cancelled, and the ones that fail question four are the expensive ones.
# THE STACK AUDIT # One pass per tool. Twelve minutes for a stack of nineteen. 01 WHEN DID YOU LAST OPEN IT? Not "do you use it". Open the app and look at the last activity date. Anything over 30 days is a candidate. Over 90 is a cancellation. 02 WHAT BREAKS IF IT VANISHES TONIGHT? Write the sentence. If you cannot finish it in one line, nothing breaks. "Our booking flow stops" is an answer. "We would lose some data" is not. 03 WHAT DID IT REPLACE? A tool that replaced nothing was an addition, not a decision. Those are almost always the ones you forgot you had. 04 WHO ELSE IS IN IT? A tool only you can operate is a single point of failure wearing a subscription. Either train somebody or accept it is a personal tool and stop calling it infrastructure. # THE TALLY # Fails 0 to 1 -> keep # Fails 2 -> cancel at renewal, set the reminder now # Fails 3+ -> cancel today, the money is already gone either way
SUBJECT: Cancel [account email] Hi, Please cancel the subscription on [account email], effective at the end of the current billing period. I do not need a call and I am not looking for a discount offer. Please confirm in writing, including the final billing date. Thanks, [name] // The second sentence is the one that matters. Without it you get a // retention call and the cancellation quietly does not happen.
The audit finds two kinds of spend. The forgotten kind, which is easy and small. And the tool you use constantly that replaced nothing, which is the expensive one, because it added a step rather than removing one.
Before you use it.
Is eight the right number?
No. Eight is what this business needs. The number is an output of the audit, not a target. If yours lands on five, you have a simpler business and that is good news.
Do I need all of these to start?
You need two. Something that holds the work and something that does the writing. Everything else on the list solves a bottleneck you have not hit yet, and buying ahead of the bottleneck is how stacks get to nineteen.
Should I not just use one all-in-one platform?
Sometimes yes. An all-in-one is a good trade when you are small and a bad one when a single piece stops fitting, because you cannot replace that piece without moving everything. Run the audit before you migrate, not after.
This is not for me if...
You are under six months in and still deciding what you sell. Cancelling tools is not the problem at that stage, and this audit will tell you to cut things you have not finished testing. Come back when the offer is settled.
What does the audit cost me?
About twelve minutes and one uncomfortable look at a bank statement. Everything on this page is yours whether or not you ever speak to me.
Get the AI & GHL Academy.
The audit above is yours either way. The Academy is where the builds behind these tools live, including the booking flow and the content system.
Want the whole thing installed instead?
One twenty minute call so I understand how you sell, and the flow is wired to that. You keep every account and owe nothing after handover.
Apply now