Six tools I stopped paying for

I did an audit in March. The stack behind a newsletter with about four thousand subscribers had reached 214 euros a month across nine subscriptions, most of which I could not remember signing up for.

It is now 38. Here is what went, and why.

Gone: the analytics suite

I was paying 49 a month for dashboards I looked at twice a month and could not act on. Cohort retention curves are interesting for a product. For a fortnightly letter, the only numbers that change anything are: how many opened it, how many replied, and how many left. My sending provider reports all three.

The trap with analytics tools is that they answer questions you did not have. I was optimising a subject line A/B test with a sample size that could not possibly reach significance, and calling it work.

Gone: the landing page builder

29 a month for a single page. It was a good page. It was also a page I edited twice in fourteen months, hosted on a domain I did not control, behind a builder that would have taken the page with it if the company folded.

It is now a static page in the same repository as everything else. Same conversion rate, measured over three months.

Gone: the scheduling tool

I wrote issues in one app, formatted them in another, and scheduled them in a third. The scheduling tool existed entirely to move text between the other two. Writing directly in the provider’s editor is slightly worse and removes an entire class of formatting bug.

Gone: two “audience growth” products

One promised recommendations from similar newsletters. It sent 900 subscribers in four months, of whom 61 ever opened anything. The other was a referral-rewards system nobody used, because the reward was a PDF.

Both were doing the same thing: adding addresses that did not want to be there, which costs you twice — once in fees, once in deliverability.

Any tool that grows your list faster than your writing earns it is borrowing against your sender reputation.

Gone: the design system

I built a beautiful HTML template with a designer. It rendered differently in seven clients and I spent an afternoon a month maintaining it. That one deserves its own issue, and gets one in two weeks.

What survived

The sending provider. 29 a month at this list size. Non-negotiable, and the place to spend if you are spending anywhere.

A domain and static hosting. About 9 a month all in, for the archive and the signup page.

A notebook. For the idea that turns into an issue, which has never once arrived while I was looking at a dashboard.

The honest conclusion of the audit was not that the tools were bad. It was that buying them felt like progress at times when writing was hard, and the spending tracked my anxiety more closely than it tracked the newsletter.

Next issue: the template, and why the plainest version of it beat the beautiful one.