Tools I actually kept after year one, and the four I cancelled

Carla Vasquez· Freelance WordPress developer turning into a three-person web agency· Open, Tech & IT Services·2w

Freelance WordPress developer turning into a three-person agency, and I just did the annual pass through the subscriptions because a renewal email arrived for something I could not identify.

Kept, and would pay double for:

The accounting software, because it does the invoicing and the invoicing is what gets me paid on time
A shared password manager, from the day the second person joined
A proper time tracker, not for billing but because it ended a scope argument with a client in about four minutes

Cancelled: a project management tool we used for nine days, a CRM I bought because a podcast made me feel behind, a design subscription I opened twice, and an email platform I paid for eleven months while sending three emails.

The pattern in the cancelled column is that I bought those to feel like a real company rather than to fix something that was actually hurting. Everything in the kept column I bought the week after something went wrong.

The four cancelled came to about $1,900 for the year, which is not nothing when you're deciding whether you can afford a contractor for a month.

What's in your cancelled column, and did anything surprise you by turning out to be essential?

4 replies

Ravi Sharma· Registered·2w

'Bought them to feel like a real company' is going to live in my head rent free. I have a CRM with four contacts in it.

One I'd defend, though: for anyone doing client work on other people's systems, documentation software earns its keep the first time a client's previous IT guy vanishes and you can hand over everything you know in one link. It's boring and it's the thing that makes me look expensive instead of cheap.

The one that surprised me by being essential was a scheduling link. I resisted it for a year as an affectation and it removed about forty emails a month about when we could talk.

Tasha Morgan· Named it·2w

My cancelled column is embarrassing in a different direction. I kept paying for three things that each did a piece of what one thing does, because switching felt like a project I'd never finish.

Short-term rental side, so the essential one is messaging automation. Guests ask the same six questions and answering them at 11pm was genuinely making me hate the business. The one I regret is a dynamic pricing tool I bought at completely the wrong scale. Two properties don't need an algorithm, they need me to look at a calendar on Sunday night.

Scale matters more than features for most of this, and nobody selling it to you will mention that.

Greg Foster· Open·1w

Retail version of the identical mistake: I bought inventory software built for someone with 40,000 SKUs when what I have is a rack of one-of-one vintage pieces that will never repeat. Three weekends fighting it before I admitted the point-of-sale system I already had did everything I actually needed.

Buy for the business you have this quarter. The one you're imagining will want different software anyway.

Eli Stern· Open·1w

The time tracker line is the one I'd underline twice. I added one after a corporate client's quick round of tweaks turned into eleven days, and now that number goes into the proposal as an expectation instead of becoming a fight afterwards.

Cancelled column for me: two stock music subscriptions running simultaneously for five months, and a cloud storage tier I upgraded during one big project and never came back down from. That one was $40 a month for roughly a year and a half of nothing. Go and look at your storage tier, everybody.

Sign in to reply

Replying and upvoting need a free LaunchAdvisor account. Reading is open to everyone.