Last Tuesday, I was sitting at my kitchen table, scrolling through my bank statement, and I realized something embarrassing: I was spending $187 a month on software subscriptions. Most of them I hadn’t opened in weeks. Some, I couldn’t even remember signing up for.
Notion. Canva Pro. ChatGPT Plus. Jasper. Midjourney. Otter.ai. Grammarly Premium. Loom. Descript. Beautiful.ai. Copy.ai. Replit.
Twelve tools. Twelve monthly charges. And honestly, I was using maybe three of them regularly — and even then, only half-heartedly.
This isn’t a productivity flex. It’s a confession.
How I Got Here
I’m a freelance content strategist. My work involves writing, editing, making presentations for clients, occasionally producing short video content, and a lot of organizing — notes, briefs, research, timelines. Over the past three years, every time I hit a friction point, my reflex was the same: find a tool, start a free trial, forget to cancel.
The result was a Frankenstein workflow. I’d draft in Notion, polish in Grammarly, generate images in Midjourney, make slides in Beautiful.ai, record quick videos in Loom, transcribe them in Otter, then edit the video in Descript. Every project meant switching between six or seven tabs, logging into six or seven accounts, and context-switching until my brain felt like mush by 3 p.m.
I told myself this was just how modern work felt. Busy. Fragmented. Expensive.
Then one night, I was trying to finish a deck for a client presentation due the next morning. I had the outline in Notion, some AI-generated images in Midjourney, and a script I’d drafted in ChatGPT. I kept copying and pasting between tabs, reformatting things, losing track of which version was current. At some point, Beautiful.ai crashed. I stared at the spinning wheel and thought: What am I actually paying all these people for?
The Audit
The next morning, I opened a spreadsheet — ironic, I know — and listed every subscription I had. Then I asked myself three questions for each one:
1. Did I use it in the last 14 days?
2. Could another tool I already have do 80% of what this does?
3. Would I notice if it disappeared tomorrow?
The answers were brutal. Grammarly Premium — I’d gotten so dependent on it that I couldn’t write a casual text without feeling naked. But honestly, my writing was fine before I had it. Cancelled. Descript — I used it twice in three months. Cancelled. Copy.ai — I couldn’t remember the last time the output was actually usable. Cancelled.
I kept Notion (my second brain, non-negotiable) and Canva Pro (I still prefer it for quick social graphics). That left me with a gap: I needed something that could handle writing assistance, presentation creation, image generation, and basic video — without me juggling four separate subscriptions.
What I Replaced Them With
I’d heard about Hey Tuya from a friend who does product design. She mentioned it casually — “I use this AI platform for everything now” — and I’d bookmarked it but forgot about it for months. During my subscription purge, I dug it up again.
What caught my attention was that Hey Tuya bundles a lot of the things I was paying for separately into one place. There’s a task assistant, an AI image generator, a video tool, a storytelling feature, and — this was the one that actually made me cancel Beautiful.ai — an AI PPT feature.
I’m not going to pretend it was love at first use. The interface took some getting used to, and the AI PPT output for my first attempt was... let’s say “aggressively corporate.” I had to rework the design quite a bit. But here’s the thing: I reworked it inside the same tool. I didn’t have to export, switch tabs, re-import, adjust formatting. The image generation was decent — not Midjourney-level, but good enough for client decks and social content. And the writing assistant handled my rough drafts without the usual AI sloppiness I’d come to expect.
There’s also an AI Notes feature that I’ve started using as a lightweight journal. Nothing fancy — just a place to dump thoughts, meeting notes, and random ideas. But it connects to the rest of the platform, which means I can pull from those notes when I’m working on other tasks. That continuity is something none of my previous tools offered without a complicated integration setup.
The surprise bonus was the websites building feature. I’m not a developer, but I used it to build a simple tool that automatically formats my client briefs into a consistent template. Took me about ten minutes, and it replaced another $8/month tool I was paying for. I’m not going to build the next Slack with it, but for small automations and quick scripts, it’s genuinely useful.
The Real Numbers
After the cleanup, here’s what my monthly software spend looks like:
• Notion: $10
• Canva Pro: $13
• Hey Tuya (free tier, currently): $0
• Total: $23/month
Down from $187. That’s $1,968 a year I’m keeping in my pocket. And honestly, my workflow feels less fragmented now than when I was paying for a dozen specialized tools.
I’m not saying Hey Tuya is perfect. The AI video tool is still early — I wouldn’t use it for anything client-facing yet. The image generation sometimes gives me hands with seven fingers. And the task assistant, while useful for quick things, isn’t going to replace a proper project management tool for complex workflows.
But that’s not what I’m arguing for. I’m arguing for good enough, in one place, over perfect, scattered everywhere.
The Bigger Lesson
Somewhere in the back of my mind, I’d been treating subscriptions like insurance. If I had the tool, I was prepared. If I might need it someday, cancelling felt risky. But the reality is that most of these tools were solving problems I didn’t actually have — or problems that one decent platform could handle without me noticing the difference.
Digital minimalism isn’t about deprivation. It’s about asking whether the thing you’re paying for is actually adding to your life, or just adding to the noise.
I still have moments where I miss the polish of a dedicated tool. Sometimes I wish the AI image output was a bit sharper. Sometimes I open a tab out of muscle memory and reach for something that isn’t there anymore.
But then I close the tab, open the one tool that handles most of what I need, and get back to work. Without the tab chaos. Without the $187 bleed. Without the low-grade anxiety of managing a dozen logins.
And that, it turns out, is worth more than any single subscription I was paying for.