The Stack

Seven subscriptions I stopped paying for.

Every one of these is running in real client work, not a list I collected to have a list. Each row has the price you are paying now, what replaced it, and the part that actually costs you something.

Airtable

$20 per user / month

Team, billed annually

Teable21.7k·teableio/teable

A real Postgres database with a spreadsheet on top, so your agents query it directly instead of through a rate-limited API.

The catch: You host it. Budget an evening for the first deploy, or run their cloud.

Calendly

$10-16 per seat / month

Standard to Teams, billed annually

Cal.com47.5k·calcom/cal.diy

The free tier gives you unlimited event types. Calendly’s free tier gives you one.

The catch: Team features (round-robin, routing) are $12 per user / month, so the saving is on solo and small setups.

Miro

$8-20 per member / month

Starter to Business, billed annually

Excalidraw129k·excalidraw/excalidraw

Opens instantly, no account, and the hand-drawn look is better for explaining a system than Miro’s clip art.

The catch: Miro’s free plan is three editable boards, so this only costs you when you need the fourth.

1Password

$8.99 per user / month

Business, billed annually

Vaultwarden65.3k·dani-garcia/vaultwarden

Per-seat password managers are the tax you pay for growing a team. This one has no seats.

The catch: You are now the one responsible for backups of the thing holding every credential.

ManyChat

$29 per month

Pro at 2,500 contacts, billed annually

OpenReply1.2k·diwenne/openreply

Comment-to-DM automation for Instagram, which is the one ManyChat feature most people actually pay for.

The catch: Young project. Automated access is against Instagram’s terms and can get an account restricted.

Frame.io

$15-25 per user / month

Pro to Team

FreeFrame156·Techiebutler/freeframe

Frame.io’s API is restrictive enough that wiring it into an automation is a project on its own. This one you own.

The catch: The smallest project on this list. Read the code before it touches client work.

Wispr Flow

$12 per user / month

Pro, billed annually

OpenSuperWhisper2.6k·Starmel/OpenSuperWhisper

Local dictation on your own machine. Nothing you say leaves it, which matters when you dictate client work.

The catch: macOS only, and transcription runs on your hardware, so an old laptop will feel it.

Prices checked 12 August 2026 · annual billing where offered

The other half of this is the system that decides what your tools should even be doing. Set up an Obsidian vault your AI can actually use walks through the one I run.

Your tools are not the bottleneck. The handoffs between them are.

Swapping a subscription saves you money. It does not save you the twenty minutes a day your team spends moving the same information from one of these tools into another one by hand.

That part is what I build. The last time I pointed it at an agency, it took over 200 hours a week of coordination work off a 50-editor team.

If your team does something by hand every week that a system should own, that is the thing I would automate first.

Show me your process

15 minutes · No pitch · Free