Subscriptions creep. A tool gets added for one project, a seat stays active after someone leaves, a plan auto-renews at a higher tier. None of it is dramatic on its own, but together it can add up to hundreds or thousands of dollars a year. A one-time cleanup usually pays for itself.
Step one: list everything
Pull the last three months of statements from every card and bank account your firm uses, and list each recurring charge: the tool, the plan, the number of seats, the monthly cost and who uses it. Most firms find at least one subscription nobody can explain.
Then sort each line into one of four groups: keep, downgrade, replace or cancel.
Where firms most often overpay
Email and office suites
Business email is essential, but not every team needs the top plan. As of October 2026, Google lists its Workspace business plans at $7, $14 and $22 per user per month. For a five-person office on the middle plan, that's $70 a month, or $840 a year. Unused seats for former staff are common and easy to remove.
Some very small teams can use a free plan instead. Zoho Mail's Forever Free plan covers up to five users with email on one custom domain and 5 GB per user, but it doesn't include IMAP or POP access (so no Outlook or Apple Mail syncing) and has no file storage. That trade-off is fine for some offices and a deal-breaker for others.
Website hosting and site builders
Hosted site builders bundle design tools, hosting and support into a monthly fee for as long as the site exists. Squarespace, for example, lists plans from $19 to $99 a month billed annually. A hand-coded static site, by contrast, can be hosted on Cloudflare Pages' free plan, which allows up to 500 builds a month and 100 custom domains per project. You trade the drag-and-drop editor for a faster site you own outright.
Duplicate tools
Two video meeting tools, two file storage services, two password managers, two scheduling tools. Pick one of each and move everyone onto it.
Forms, scheduling and newsletters
Many of these tools offer free tiers that comfortably cover a small firm's volume. Check your actual usage before paying for a plan sized for a company ten times larger.
When paying is worth it
Free isn't automatically better. Paying makes sense when you need:
- Support with a guarantee, for systems your business can't run without.
- Compliance features, such as signed agreements for regulated data, audit logs or retention controls.
- Integrations your team relies on, like syncing email to the desktop apps you use every day.
- Room to grow, if you'll outgrow a free tier's limits within the year.
The goal isn't to spend nothing. It's to pay only for what earns its place.
Make the switch safely
- Export your data from any tool before you cancel it.
- Move one system at a time, starting with the simplest.
- For email, plan the cutover for a quiet day and update your domain's records carefully, so no messages are lost.
- Keep the account owner as someone at your firm, not a vendor.
- Set a calendar reminder to repeat the review once a year.
Our tech cost cleanup does all of this for you: the full list, the recommendations, the moves and a before-and-after summary of your monthly costs. Prices for third-party tools change often, so we always check the current plans before recommending anything.