The Small Business Tech Stack Audit: Find the Tools You’re Overpaying For

ByFrank Deardurff

Pull up your last three months of credit card statements and count the software subscriptions. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Most business owners are surprised. A $9 tool here, a $29 plan there, an annual renewal they forgot about, a trial that quietly turned into a paid account. It adds up fast, and a lot of it isn’t being used.

Once a year, I recommend a simple tech stack audit: a look at every tool your business pays for, what it does, and whether it’s earning its keep. Here’s the checklist.

Step 1: Make the list

Start a simple spreadsheet with these columns:

  • Tool name
  • What it does
  • Monthly cost (convert annual plans to monthly)
  • Renewal date
  • Who uses it
  • Whose account and card it’s on

Where to find everything:

  • Credit card and bank statements (12 months, to catch annual renewals)
  • Your email inbox: search for “receipt,” “invoice,” “renewal” and “subscription”
  • App store subscriptions on your phone
  • PayPal’s automatic payments list
  • Your domain registrar and hosting accounts

Step 2: Ask four questions about each tool

  1. Are we using it? When did someone last log in? If nobody can remember, that’s your answer.
  2. Does something else already do this? This is where most savings hide. You might be paying for a scheduling tool, a form builder and an email tool when your email platform does all three.
  3. Are we on the right plan? Many tools push you up to the next tier for one feature. Check whether you still need it, and whether you’re paying for seats for people who’ve left.
  4. Would we miss it? If you canceled it tomorrow, what would break?

Mark each tool Keep, Downgrade, Replace or Cancel.

Step 3: Look for overlap

These are the categories where I most often find duplicates:

  • Email marketing and forms
  • Scheduling and booking
  • File storage (Dropbox and Google Drive and OneDrive)
  • Project management and to-do apps
  • Video meetings
  • Design tools
  • AI tools (this is the new one, with a separate subscription for every task)
  • WordPress plugins with annual licenses (see Plugins: How Many Is Too Many?)

Step 4: Check the essentials are covered

Cutting costs shouldn’t leave holes. Make sure you have:

  • Website backups stored off your server (Backup Checklist)
  • A way to get paid online, with professional invoices
  • One place for customer support requests, not scattered across inboxes
  • Email on your own domain with SPF, DKIM and DMARC set up (here’s how)
  • A password manager for the team
  • Two-factor authentication on every account that supports it

Full disclosure: these are exactly the gaps that led me to build some of my own tools, like PayBlue for payments and invoicing, SupportDsk for help desk support, and PushTimer for time tracking.

Step 5: Check who owns what

This is the part people skip, and the one that causes the most pain later.

  • Is every account in the business’s name, using a business email address, not a former employee’s or contractor’s?
  • Does more than one person know how to get in? If the only person with the login leaves or gets sick, can the business still access its domain, website, email and payments?
  • Is your domain on auto-renew with a card that won’t expire next month?
  • Remove former employees and contractors from every tool.

Keep your logins in a password manager or a secure document, so the right people can get in when they need to.

Step 6: Make the changes

  • Cancel before the renewal date. Put the dates on your calendar.
  • Export your data first. Download anything you’ll need before closing an account.
  • Switch annual where it makes sense. For tools you’re definitely keeping, annual plans are often 15 to 20% cheaper.
  • Downgrade plans and remove unused seats.
  • Ask for a better deal. When you go to cancel, many companies will offer a discount to keep you.

Step 7: Put it on the calendar

Set a reminder to do this once a year, and add a rule for new tools: when you sign up for something, add it to the spreadsheet with its renewal date.

The quick version

  1. List every tool, its cost, renewal date and owner.
  2. Ask: are we using it, does something else do this, are we on the right plan, would we miss it?
  3. Cut overlap.
  4. Make sure the essentials are covered.
  5. Make sure the business, not a person, owns every account.
  6. Cancel, downgrade or switch before renewal dates.
  7. Repeat every year.

It’s common to find a few hundred dollars a year in savings the first time through, and sometimes much more. Want a second opinion on your setup? Get in touch.

Similar Posts