A few months ago I finally sat down and audited every AI subscription my team was paying for. Turns out we were quietly burning roughly $220 every month on overlapping tools that did basically the same job.
Recent research shows this is common, organizations waste an average of 32% of their AI subscription budgets on redundant or underused tools.
The biggest overlap categories I personally ran into (and still see with other founders):
- Multiple frontier LLMs (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc.)
- Several image generation platforms
- Video generation and editing tools whose features have converged fast
- Research, writing, and productivity layers stacked on top of each other
Instead of guessing, I now run this simple manual audit every quarter:
- Export the last 3 months of credit-card or expense reports.
- List every AI tool + its actual monthly cost.
- For each tool, write down its single main job.
- Ask: “Can any other tool I already pay for handle at least 80% of this job?”
- Flag anything we wouldn’t truly miss if it disappeared tomorrow.
This quick exercise alone surfaces real savings for most small teams and solopreneurs.
Because repeating the manual checklist every few months became tedious as new tools launched and prices changed, I turned the whole thing into a free, no-account-needed tracker that flags overlaps automatically.
Originally posted here: https://aipowerstacks.com
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