Journal ·
Stop renting software you could own
Many firms now spend more on software subscriptions than they realise. How to look at the bill honestly, and when it makes sense to build the part you actually use.
Most businesses do not decide to spend a fortune on software. It happens one sign-up at a time. Someone needs a form builder, then a scheduling tool, then a CRM, then the CRM's email add-on. Each one is a sensible monthly figure on its own. Together they become a bill nobody owns.
The quiet bill
Subscriptions are designed to be easy to start and easy to forget. They sit on a company card or a direct debit, they renew without asking, and the price creeps up with every new starter because most are charged per seat.
In our experience the people paying the bill are rarely the people using the tools. Finance sees a line called “software”. The team sees a login. Nobody sees the whole picture.
What £20,000 to £30,000 a year looks like
We regularly talk to firms that are spending somewhere between £20,000 and £30,000 a year on subscriptions. That is not a survey figure. It is what we see when we sit down with a business and add the lines up. Some spend less, and some spend a great deal more.
The useful question is not whether that number is high. It is how much of it is buying something you actually use.
What you are actually paying for
When we go through a stack with someone, the pattern tends to repeat:
- A handful of features that the team uses every day.
- A long list of features nobody has opened, which you pay for because they come in the plan.
- Seats for people who have left, or who log in twice a year.
- Two or three tools that overlap, because different teams bought them at different times.
- Price rises that arrive by email and get approved by default.
None of this is anyone's fault. It is how the software is sold.
A different approach
Start with a list of every tool you pay for, what it costs a year, and who uses it. Then sort it into three piles.
Keep. Some tools are worth the money. Accounting software, for instance, carries a lot of compliance work you do not want to rebuild. Payroll is similar. Leave them alone.
Cancel. Anything nobody would notice if it disappeared. Every business has a few.
Replace. Tools where you use a small, generic slice of a large product. A contact list with email campaigns. A map of where your vehicles are. A way to post the same thing to five social accounts. A consolidated view of several companies' accounts. These are the jobs where a bespoke tool, built for exactly what you do, can cost far less to own than to rent.
That last pile is where we work. We have built each of those examples for a UK taxi group, which you can read about on our work page. We use AI agents to write and maintain the code, which brings the cost of building and looking after a tool down to something a smaller business can justify. A person still owns every decision.
What we aim for
Our aim is to cut at least two thirds of the subscription spend we are asked to look at. Some stacks will not get there, and we will say so before any work starts. We would rather tell you to keep a tool than build something that costs you more.
Owning software is not free. It has to be hosted, patched, backed up and changed as you grow. The comparison that matters is the full cost of owning it against the full cost of renting it, over several years.
What happens next
If you want a second opinion, send us your list: what you pay for, roughly what it costs, and what you use it for. A quick question to Beardy on this site is free. A proper look at your stack, with a written recommendation, is paid consultancy, and we will agree the price before we start.