Last updated: April 2026 · By Chris Navarro
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In March I added up my SaaS subscriptions and got annoyed. $312 a month, half of which I barely used. I run a one-person consulting practice, so most of these tools were quietly bleeding me out for features I touched maybe twice a quarter.
So I ran a real test. For 30 days, I cancelled or paused six paid tools and tried to handle every job they did using only ChatGPT Plus ($20/month) and the free tier of Claude. No fancy plugins, no custom GPTs, no Make or Zapier scaffolding to make it look smarter than it was. Just the chat window.
Here's the breakdown of what got cut, what genuinely worked, and what I had to bring back by week three.
To make this honest, here's exactly what I shut off and the monthly cost of each:
Total saved during the test: $207/month, or roughly $2,484 over a year if it stuck.
This one surprised me. I assumed Copy.ai's marketing-trained models would beat ChatGPT for ad copy and email funnels. They didn't. Once I gave ChatGPT a clear brief (audience, offer, tone reference from my own past emails, character limits) the output was tighter and more on-brand. Copy.ai often gave me three flavors of the same generic angle. ChatGPT actually produced angles I hadn't considered.
Caveat: Copy.ai is faster if you don't want to write the brief. ChatGPT punishes lazy prompting.
I'd been paying $30/month for Grammarly Premium for years. ChatGPT eats that lunch. The prompt I settled on: "Proofread the following. Fix grammar and clarity issues, tighten sentences over 25 words, flag anything that sounds passive or hedgy. Return the edited text and a short list of what you changed and why."
The "what you changed and why" is the unlock. Grammarly tells you to accept or reject. ChatGPT teaches you why your writing was off, which means you stop making the same mistakes.
Before any sales call, I'd paste the prospect's LinkedIn bio, their company About page, and the latest two posts from their blog into ChatGPT and ask for a one-page brief: who they are, what they probably care about, three smart questions to ask, and a likely objection. SimplyCal used to do a watered-down version of this for $12/month. ChatGPT did it better in 90 seconds.
Otter.ai is the one I had to bring back by day 19. ChatGPT can summarize a transcript beautifully, but it cannot listen to a live Zoom call and produce one. I tried recording calls and uploading audio files, but the workflow added 20 minutes per meeting and the file size limits kept tripping me up on longer sessions.
If your job involves live meetings, you still need a dedicated transcription tool. I went back to Otter on day 20 and was relieved.
Notion AI lives inside the document you're already writing. ChatGPT lives in another tab. That sounds trivial. It isn't. By week two I'd noticed I was using AI assistance noticeably less inside Notion documents, just because the friction of switching windows was enough to stop me. I didn't bring Notion AI back, but I did install a browser extension that lets me right-click any selected text and send it to ChatGPT, which closed about 80% of the gap.
This is where I cheated. ChatGPT Plus has a context limit that gets uncomfortable around the 60-page mark. For a client project mid-month I had a 140-page market report I needed analyzed, and ChatGPT either truncated it silently or refused outright. I switched to Claude's free tier, which handled the whole document in one shot with its 200K context window.
So technically I didn't run a "ChatGPT only" test. I ran a "ChatGPT plus free Claude when documents got long" test. For the price difference (free vs. $89/month for the SaaS I cancelled) I'll take it.
Of the six tools I cancelled, I brought back exactly one (Otter). The other five stayed cancelled. My monthly SaaS spend dropped from $312 to $129, and the work didn't get worse. In two cases (proofreading and marketing copy) it got measurably better.
Here's the honest tradeoff: ChatGPT is more flexible than any single-purpose tool, but it requires you to do more of the work upfront. You have to know what you want, write the prompt, give it tone references, and review the output critically. Single-purpose SaaS tools have those decisions baked in. They're easier. They're just also more expensive and worse at the edges.
If you're paying for three or more AI-adjacent SaaS tools right now, I'd run the same experiment. Pick a 30-day window, cancel them, and see what you actually miss. My guess is less than you think.
Before you cancel anything, audit what you actually use. Open each tool and check your last 30 days of activity. If you logged in fewer than 4 times, it's a candidate. If you used it daily, leave it alone.
The point isn't to use ChatGPT for everything. It's to stop paying for tools that are quietly turning into checkbox subscriptions. The cancellation email takes 90 seconds. The savings compound.