Stop paying for 6 AI subscriptions. How to consolidate without losing anything.

Last updated: July 2026. Prices change often. Verify against official pricing pages before acting.

It happens one signup at a time. ChatGPT for general use. An AI writing tool someone recommended. An image generator for social posts. A meeting notetaker. An AI email helper. Each felt like $20 well spent, and now you're paying $100 to $300 a month for tools that substantially overlap. Here's how to cut the stack without losing a single capability you actually use.

How subscription creep happens

Each tool was bought to solve the problem in front of you that day, and each one quietly does 70 percent of what the others do, because most of them are built on the same handful of underlying models. You didn't buy six capabilities. You bought one capability six times, with six different login screens.

The consolidation principle

The general-purpose assistants have become genuinely broad. As of July 2026, a single top-tier subscription to ChatGPT Plus, Claude Pro, or Google's AI Pro plan runs about $20 a month, and each covers writing and editing, analysis, working with documents and images, meeting-style summarization from transcripts, and light coding in one place. That one subscription replaces the median AI stack we see small businesses carrying.

Which one? For most owners it matters less than picking one and moving your work into it. They leapfrog each other every few months. Switching later is cheap. Paying for all three plus four specialists is the only clearly wrong answer.

What still deserves its own tool

Consolidation has limits. A dedicated tool earns its subscription when it meets one of these criteria:

• It's wired into a system you run. Accounting tools that post to your books, scheduling tools that write to your calendar. The integration is the product, not the AI.
• It's built for your industry's rules. Legal, medical, and financial tools that handle compliance for you.
• It does one hard thing measurably better. If you produce video every week, a dedicated video tool may beat the generalist. Test, don't assume.

Categories, not brand names, on purpose. The test is the criteria, not the logo.

The audit, in four steps

1. List every AI subscription and its monthly price. Check your card statement, not your memory. There's usually one you forgot.
2. Map each to a job. One line each: "drafts social posts," "transcribes meetings." If you can't name the job, that's your answer already.
3. Test each job in your primary assistant. Take last week's real task and run it through your $20 generalist. Compare honestly.
4. Cancel the overlap. Keep anything that passed the criteria above. Calendar a re-check in six months, because the generalists keep absorbing categories.

What this looks like in dollars

A typical creeped stack: one generalist plus four specialist tools at $15 to $30 each lands between $80 and $140 a month. After consolidation, most land at $20 to $40: one generalist, plus at most one earned specialist. Prices verified July 2026 against current published plan pricing. Yours will differ, which is why step 1 uses your card statement and not our table.

The dollars are honestly the smaller win. The bigger one is that your work and its history end up in one tool that gets better the more context it holds, instead of scattered across six.

Want a second pair of eyes on your stack? Send us your list through the contact form. Telling you what to cancel is a short conversation, and we like short conversations.