I added up every tool subscription I pay as a solo founder. The total surprised me more than my revenue.
I run a few online products as a solo founder. No employees, no office, just me and a laptop. I've always tracked what I earn, but I never once sat down and added up what I spend on tools every month. Turns out it's more than I thought. Hosting: $5/mo. AI…
I run a few online products as a solo founder. No employees, no office, just me and a laptop. I've always tracked what I earn, but I never once sat down and added up what I spend on tools every month. Turns out it's more than I thought. Hosting: $5/mo. AI tools (Claude, OpenAI): $30-40/mo. Lovable: $20/mo. DataFast: $90/year. Another SaaS tool: $89/year. Domain renewals: $40/year base, plus $10 for every new domain. Plus company taxes just so I can accept payments through Stripe. Converted everything to monthly and I'm somewhere around $80-90/mo, on tools alone, before taxes, before any one-off purchases. I currently make $0/mo in recurring revenue, and earn <$200 in February. So my "business" is just a machine that currently costs $80-90/mo and produces just content and code. The weird part is I never felt like I was spending that much. Each tool is $5 or $10 or $20. You sign up for a free trial, forget to cancel, or you actually need it for one project and then it just keeps renewing. I had to go through my bank statements and Stripe charges to even find them all. And I'm on the low end. I know people running e-commerce stores or agencies with 20-30 subscriptions. Email tools, CRMs, scheduling software, analytics, hosting, design tools, accounting software. I'd bet most of them don't know their total either. The problem is there's no easy way to see this number. Accounting software tracks invoices and tax stuff, but it's not built to show you "here's what you're actually keeping after all your subscriptions." Spreadsheets work until you stop updating them (I've tried but gave up). I actually started building something to solve this for myself, a simple tool that pulls my income and expenses into one view and just shows my real profit (turns out it's negative). Currently using it myself, but I'm wondering if this is a problem other people actually have or if I'm the only one who wasn't tracking expenses properly. Do you know what you actually keep every month after all your tools, subscriptions, and recurring costs? Or do you just look at revenue and assume it's fine?
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Oui assez d’accord avec toi. On n’est pas obligé de coder un nouvel outil à chaque besoin qu’un outil existant sait déjà traiter. Avec le vibe coding on voit fleurir moult propositions de ce type. L’IA n’a pas modifié un pré requis avant de se lancer : toujours évaluer le besoin et en quoi la proposition est une réelle solution différenciante à ce besoin.
My thoughts exactly. Accounting software shows the final results after all income and expenditure.
Isn't that what quickbooks and zero (and many more) all do?
I'm a solopreneur actually sharing my real story But I may be stuck in the indie hacker world of thinking it seems, maybe that's why this seems odd to you
Thanks for the feedback! Currently using Lovable since they have a hackathon going on with Polar, otherwise I am an engineer and use Claude Code in my workflow, and I also don't really like "vibe coding"
But that’s your issue right there - it sounds like you palm off the numbers to your accountant. If you’re using a tool for your business, it should be a business expense. We have an accountant, but we also log into Xero almost daily to keep tabs on sales, expenses, gross margin, tax liabilities and net profit. With all due respect, I see a lot of the AI entrepreneur generation going on and on about MRR like it’s some kind of magic cheat code or something special. It’s returning customers - been a thing in traditional business forever. How you show, track and account that is no different at all from any other business. As the old saying goes, turnover is vanity, profit is sanity. The new one should be MRR is vanity, profit is sanity.
So you built something that a spreadsheet and 15 mins would have solved ? Seems like an.overcomplicated solution
Hm, I understand what you're saying, my accountant for my company actually has the data somewhat, but I don't buy everything on my company so that's why it isn't accurate for me I was thinking a bit backwards regarding this, I looked at TrustMRR (from the indie hacker world) that only tracks MRR and I needed something that also tracks net profit, and didn't find anything like this But yeah, if I would just use my accounting for everything then this problem would have been solved...
He will gladly sell it to Reddit for a subscription fee 😁
I understand but as mentionned there are plenty of tools doing that. All your saying that as an entrepreneur who doesn't make a dime yet, you've spent hours procrastinating on a tool that solve a non existing problem at the time. I bet you that i can input 3 years of accounting in the same amount of time you spent prompting to get all that working.
“Accounting software tracks invoices and tax stuff, but it's not built to show you "here's what you're actually keeping after all your subscriptions."” Doesn’t it? What accounting software are you using? I’m not being funny, but that’s exactly what accounting software shows. I’m not following why I’d want to double entry my expenses and sales into a separate tool to show me something that Xero can show me.
You need to keep the spreadsheet updated manually. What I built pulls income numbers automatically from Stripe and tracks monthly expenses based on what tools you use. I am also looking into adding connection to my bank to pull expenses automatically, but it is a bit more complex to handle.
Tool creep is a massive thing - I audit every month
Why does the sub name have a popover that says "real entrepreneurs. real stories" when I mouse over it? Its so confusing when seeing that next to posts like this.
It creeps up fast. Individually they all feel cheap, but together it adds up before you realise it. Easy to justify each one at the time.
The Business & Personal version of Quicken Simplifi does a pretty good job with this problem already and it’s only four dollars a month. I’d consider checking that out before you build anything. Given your only dev related subscription was Lovable I’m guessing you’re vibe coding something. There’s no way that I would give a Lovable coded startup access to my bank accounts, even through something like Plaid.
This is painfully relatable. I did the same audit a few months back and it was genuinely shocking. The thing that got me was how many tools I was paying for that I'd used once, maybe twice, and then just forgot about. The free trial to paid pipeline is designed to catch you out and it works brilliantly. What changed it for me was switching my mindset from "what tools do I need" to "what's the absolute minimum I can get away with." Turns out the answer is way less than you think. I cancelled about 6 things in one go and literally nothing changed about my workflow. That's when you know you've been paying for peace of mind, not actual utility. The $80-90/mo might not sound like much but when your revenue is under $200 that's nearly half your income going straight back out. That ratio is the thing worth watching, not the absolute number.
$80-90/mo is actually pretty lean for a functioning solo business. the people spending $500+ are usually the ones who signed up for 15 tools during free trials and never canceled. the real hidden cost is not the subscriptions though. it is the time you spend context-switching between all of them. every tool has its own login, dashboard, notification system, and learning curve. at some point the overhead of managing the tools starts eating into the time they were supposed to save. what worked for me was doing a quarterly audit. cancel anything I have not opened in 30 days. if I do not miss it for two weeks after canceling, it was not essential.
I like turtles.
The sneaky part is how each tool feels "affordable" on its own. $5 here, $10 there, until you add it up and realize you're funding a second job for your tools. I was in a similar spot last year. What helped me was going through my bank statements with a highlighter and marking anything I hadn't used in 30 days. Saved me about $40/mo. Btw, for the AI tools, have you tried using the free tiers first? Claude and OpenAI both have some usage included that might stretch further than you think. Also curious are any of these tools things you could replace with one tool that does both?