We Tracked 14 AI Tool Subscriptions for 90 Days. 8 Got Cancelled.

Across 90 days we ran 14 AI tool subscriptions side-by-side. 8 got cancelled, 6 stayed. The keepers cost $88/month combined and save ~40 hours/month. The cancellations cost $288/month and saved almost nothing. Six survivors:

We bought 14 AI tool subscriptions over a 90-day window and tracked every minute we spent inside each one, every workflow we tried to build, and every euro we paid. At day 90 we ran the spreadsheet. Eight tools got cancelled. Six stayed. This is what the data showed, what killed the eight, and why the six earned a permanent line in the budget.

The Methodology

For each tool we logged three numbers per week: minutes spent inside the app, minutes saved versus the manual equivalent (estimated honestly, not optimistically), and any output the tool produced that we actually shipped to a client or to ourselves. At the end of each month a tool got a score: hours-saved-per-dollar. Anything under 0.1 hours per dollar went on the watchlist. Anything under 0.05 got cancelled. No tool got grandfathered in. We named the survivors. We anonymised the cancellations to keep the focus on patterns, not pile-ons.

The Full 14-Tool Table

The 8 Cancellations: What Killed Them

The losers were not bad tools. Most are well-reviewed, well-funded, and used by thousands of operators. They lost because of how they fit into our actual week, not because of feature gaps. Four patterns showed up over and over.

• Redundancy with a tool we already paid for. Two of the eight (the second meeting scheduler and the second presentation tool) overlapped 80% with tools already in the stack. We thought we'd switch. We never did.
• The chat-wrapper problem. Three of the eight were essentially nicer interfaces around an LLM we were already paying for via ChatGPT or Claude. Once we noticed, we couldn't unnotice.
• Workflow we never built. Two of the eight required us to set up new processes (project management with AI summaries, AI SEO research) that we kept postponing. After 60 days of postponement, the tool was clearly not solving an active problem.
• Hidden cost in switching. The all-in-one AI writer was the most expensive cancellation at $89/month. The real cost wasn't the subscription — it was the 11 hours we spent migrating prompts, templates, and brand guidelines that we then migrated back out.

The 6 Keepers — and Why They Stayed

Each of the six survivors clears a high bar: it saves at least two hours per week, it integrates into a workflow we run every week (not every quarter), and the cost is recoverable in fewer than five working days of saved time. Here's what each one earns in the stack.

Make.com — $9/mo (Core plan, 10k operations)

The highest hours-per-dollar tool in the audit by a wide margin. We replaced manual invoicing handoffs, lead-import flows, and three separate Zapier zaps with Make scenarios. The visual builder takes a weekend to learn and then pays for itself for years.

Best for: Anyone running more than two recurring workflows across SaaS tools.

Opus Clip — $19/mo (Starter)

Repurposes a long-form podcast or video into 8-12 short clips per upload. Eight hours per month saved versus manual editing. The hours saved are real because we'd otherwise hire an editor at $40-60/hour for the same output.

Best for: Anyone publishing long-form video or podcast content and wanting clips for social.

Kit — $25/mo (Creator, 10k subscribers)

Email infrastructure for creators and one-person businesses. The visual automation builder, native commerce, and tagging made it cheaper and simpler than the $49/mo all-in-one marketing tool we'd been using. Six hours per month saved on segmentation and broadcast prep.

Best for: Creators, solopreneurs, anyone with a list under 50k.

Cal.com — $15/mo (Pro)

Self-hosted scheduling that integrates with our calendar, payment processor, and CRM in one config. Replaced two paid schedulers (one was cancelled in this audit). Three hours per month saved on calendar back-and-forth — small in isolation, large across 36 weeks per year.

Best for: Anyone selling time (consultants, coaches, freelancers, agencies).

Fireflies.ai — $10/user/mo (Pro, annual)

Records, transcribes, and summarises every call across Zoom, Meet, and Teams. Five hours per month saved on note-taking and action-item follow-up. The AskFred search across past meetings is the feature that made it sticky — searching by topic across 90 days of calls is something we now rely on weekly.

Best for: Consultants, sales, anyone running 5+ recurring calls per week.

Gamma — $10/mo (Plus)

Replaced PowerPoint and Google Slides for client decks. Four hours per month saved versus our previous design workflow — and the output looks better, which matters more than the time savings for client-facing decks. The second AI presentation tool we tried was cancelled because Gamma covered the same ground.

Best for: Anyone producing client decks, internal updates, or pitch decks regularly.

The Cost Math: 90 Days, in Dollars

5 Rules for Your Own 90-Day Audit

• Two-hour rule. Any new tool must save at least 2 hours/week within 30 days or it gets cancelled. No exceptions for tools we 'might use more later'.
• No category overlap. One scheduler, one writer, one slide tool, one automation hub. If a candidate overlaps with a tool already in the stack, the bar is replacement-or-nothing, not coexistence.
• 14-day calendar reminder on every trial. The default in our brain is 'I'll evaluate it later'. The calendar reminder makes 'later' a specific Tuesday.
• Migration cost is a real cost. Before signing up for any all-in-one tool, estimate hours to migrate in and hours to migrate out. If those exceed two weekends, default to no.
• Free tier first, paid tier when forced. Five of the eight cancellations were on paid tiers because the free tier didn't show what we needed — and the paid tier didn't either. Free tier is the honest version of the product.

Run Your Own 90-Day Audit

Pick the category in your stack that's drained the most money over the past quarter and run the math first. Our free calculators give you the hours-saved-per-dollar number for any tool you're evaluating in email, content writing, scheduling, meetings, and ten other categories. For the framework behind the math, see how to calculate AI tool ROI. For more tools that hit the 30-day payback bar, see 10 AI tools that pay for themselves in 30 days.