A founder asked me to “look at our tools” after a month where three people could not agree which board held client work. This is the shortened case study: what we found, what we cut, what we kept, and what broke for a week afterward.
Starting point
Nine paid tools: project board A, project board B (trial that became paid), chat, email marketing, “all-in-one” docs, cloud storage, e-signature, password manager, and a CRM nobody opened. Annualized spend was roughly $4,100. More painful than the money: status updates lived in three places, so clients got conflicting answers.
The audit method (90 minutes)
We did not start with feature comparisons. We asked each person two questions: Which tool did you open yesterday for real work? Which tool would you notice disappearing tomorrow? Then we pulled login and billing data. Tools with “yes” from marketing decks and “no” from last-login reports went on the cut list.
What we cut
- Project board B — duplicate of board A; kept only because one contractor preferred it. Migrated active cards in two hours.
- All-in-one docs suite — used as a second drive. Files moved back to the existing cloud storage with a clear folder map.
- CRM — three contacts updated in four months. Pipeline returned to a shared sheet with four fields until volume justified software again.
What we kept (and why)
Chat, email marketing, e-signature, password manager, cloud storage, and one project board. Kept tools had a named owner, weekly use, and a job no other tool already did. “Nice dashboard” was not a job.
The messy week after
Two client threads still linked to board B URLs. We posted a single redirect note in chat and pinned the canonical board. One person rebuilt a personal kanban in a notebook for three days, then returned to board A when the team stopped answering status questions in DMs. Short-term friction is normal. Dual systems for a month is how cuts fail.
What I would repeat
Audit with last-login evidence, cut duplicates before negotiating discounts, assign owners before buying replacements, and set a 30-day freeze on new tools after a cut. Discounts on unused software are still waste.
Numbers, honestly
Board B was about $80/month at their seat count. The docs suite was $72. The CRM was $58 on a plan they never used past the contact list. Roughly $210/month, about $2,500 a year, before tax. Export and cleanup took one afternoon plus two hours of link-fixing the following week. The founder’s time that afternoon was the real cost. It still beat another year of “we should tidy the stack.”
I would not promise the same dollar amount on your books. I would promise the same method: last login, duplicate jobs, named owners, freeze. If those four steps do not produce a Cut, you may actually need what you pay for — or you have not looked at billing yet.
What I would not do again
I would not hold a group vote on which board was “nicer.” Preference is not a job. I would not migrate closed cards. History stayed readable in Board B for 30 days, then the workspace was archived. Dragging corpses into the new board is how people decide the new tool is cluttered and bounce back.