AI tools for solo business owners: what I pay for and what I dropped

Buy categories, not tools

Individual products change every quarter; the jobs do not. When I look at spend, I look at five categories, and I allow one paid tool per category at most.

• A general assistant for drafting, rewriting and triage — the one you open most.
• Something that handles your inbox or scheduling wrapper.
• One place where your prompts, SOPs and templates actually live.
• Whatever produces the thing you sell, if it is media or code.
• Measurement — analytics and payment reporting, so decisions have numbers behind them.

The one-week test before anything renews

A trial is not a test. A test has a named task and a stopwatch. Before I let a subscription roll into a second month, it has to have replaced a specific job, not improved a vague feeling of productivity.

Tool: {name}. Cost per month: {price}. The specific task I bought it for: {task}. Times I used it this week: {n}. Time it saved per use, honestly: {minutes}. My hourly value: {number}. Calculate monthly time saved and its value, compare to the cost, and give a keep or cancel with one sentence of reasoning. If usage was under three times, say cancel.

The categories that quietly waste money

Three patterns burn cash in a solo operation. Two of them look productive, which is why they survive so long.

• Overlap: two tools doing the same job because you bought the second one during a busy week.
• Aspirational tooling: bought for the business you plan to have, paid for by the one you actually have.
• Automation for work that only happens twice a month — the setup cost never pays back.

Cheap beats clever, most of the time

Almost everything I run day to day is a general assistant plus a text file of prompts. The prompt file is doing more work than any specialised tool I have paid for, because the constraint in a one-person business is knowing exactly what to ask for — not having a fancier interface to ask through.

That is also why I keep the file rather than the subscription when money is tight. Tools churn; a good prompt you have already tested does not.

Set a ceiling and review it monthly

Pick a monthly number you are willing to spend on tools and treat it as fixed. When something new looks compelling, it has to displace something already on the list. Without a ceiling, the stack grows by one small subscription at a time and you find it in a bank statement six months later.

Here is every tool I pay for, with monthly cost and what it is for: {paste list}. My ceiling is {amount} per month. Group them by job, flag every overlap, and propose the cheapest set that still covers each job. For anything you cut, name what I lose. No recommendations for tools I did not list.