Every new year is an opportunity to reassess our priorities. This January, I took a hard look at my monthly software subscriptions. They say that the defining characteristic of Baby Boomers is a dozen paid-for but unused app subscriptions. I always like to play against type, and so I’m pretty good at cancelling them, but it still surprised me how much things had changed in only one year.
Goodbye Receipt Platform, Hello Claude
This was the easiest cut to make. Every January, my thoughts turn to doing my taxes, and that involves gathering a lot of information. Being self-employed is great, but it makes doing one’s taxes a slog. I long ago figured out that I should have a dedicated credit card for business (preferably one with a nice, high fee that I can deduct), but it’s not always possible to use that card, and only that card, for business expenses. So, I dutifully make scans of my receipts. Last year, I found a dedicated receipt tracking platform, and I was happy that it scanned and categorized receipts for me. I got a year’s subscription, in anticipation of this year’s tax homework.
But this year I did an experiment, and sent copies of receipts to Claude, asking it to extract the information, and organize it into a spreadsheet that I can sort by date and vendor. It did a great job.
The receipt platform cost me $6/month. That may not sound like much, but Claude does it better for free (or as part of my Claude Pro subscription, which I was already using for a boatload of other things).
Ingesting my receipts on Claude did have a glitch: I hit my compute limit. But I solved that by waiting a few hours and then changing my prompts to eliminate unnecessary aspects of the output, like categorization, which cost extra compute cycles.
My only regret is that I am now getting less use out of my beloved Keychron number pad, which I customized with colored keycaps, and for which I have a deep and abiding attachment.
Adobe’s Value Proposition Failed
This is another specialized software suite that got gobbled up by the general LLMs. I’ve been a relatively happy customer of Adobe for a while, but by the end of last year, as my needs changed, the main thing driving my Creative Cloud subscription was Firefly. For quite a while, it was the best-of-breed image generator. But it got blown out of the water by Gemini in the last few months.
I mostly use image generation for slide decks, or articles like this one. So, for an upcoming talk, I asked Gemini and Firefly to produce an image for “the marriage of open source and AI” depicting a penguin marrying a robot.
Here’s what I got. The Adobe one was not awful, but it had some creepy elements. What is up with the dolphin? Are those a regular sight at weddings these days? “Open hearts & source code” not only contains a misused ampersand, it sounds like a bad translation on a Japanese T-Shirt. The bride looks so miserable she might be the victim of wife stealing, and her dress is slit up to her non-existent private parts.
The Gemini image got the message across, without out any extraneous dolphins or wardrobe malfunctions.
I cancelled my Adobe subscription the next day.
Microsoft Office Is Now Google Workspace!
Just kidding! Both Google and Microsoft are notorious for rebranding, but this was a sea change in requirements, not names.
I held onto my personal Microsoft 365 subscription for over a decade, mostly out of fear of that one moment when a client would call with a hair-on-fire demand that required me to run a redline on my cell phone. But when I examined my workflow, I realized Google Docs and Sheets, supplemented by Libre Office, could do everything I needed. The real-time collaboration in Google Drive is great, the mobile apps are excellent, and the interface is clean. Microsoft Office used to be the only tool that could reliably produce redlines. But now Google’s apps do this, too.
Plus, I consolidated my storage needs in the process. These days, it’s nearly impossible to go without a cloud storage service. Yes, I have friends who run their own private cloud server, but most of us mere mortals can’t be bothered. If you have more than one that you use regularly, you can more easily get lost in the hellish landscape of trying to find your documents. To me, Google Drive works best mainly because–surprise!–its search feature is the best. When you are thinking, “I know I wrote a thing about that thing once, what was that thing called?” and try to find it in Outlook or One Drive–forget it.
Becoming a Paid Prifina User
This one’s new. I’ve been using Prifina for a while. I love the digital twin concept. If you are worried about AI taking your job, you might consider that knowledge work is kind of like figure skating: the success of work product is about half performance and half reputation. With a digital twin, you can train your own AI on whatever you like. Prifina respects your personal data, and its training dashboard is drag-and-drop. So when my free account expired last year, I put money behind it. The idea of having a digital twin that I actually control—that learns from my data and lets me control my personal branding—is the right kind of AI for me.
You can check out my bot COSSMO here: https://chinstrap.community/ask-cossmo/. It’s trained on most of my writing.
Spotify? YouTube Music? Amazon Music? CD-ROMs?
I seriously do not understand how people deal with their music anymore. This is one of those areas where the available tech is getting worse and worse.
Now, perhaps that’s because I’m an eccentric dinosaur. I want music, not music-as-a-service. I’m a musician, so I record some of my own music. None of the music services can deal with that, and none of the few remaining players are good at it, either. Next, I choreograph dance routines, and for those, I need to download the music and cut it in my digital audio workstation. That requires access to local digital copies. Next, I like to listen to music on planes, where streaming doesn’t work. (Who doesn’t? I guess, people who don’t travel?) Last, I have no desire at all for the latest hits, because, true to my dinosaur self, I don’t think more than a dozen good songs have been released since the music industry died, which was sometime around 1992. So I don’t care about what any platform thinks I want to listen to (because they’re wrong).
I want my 2004 iPod mini back! But you can’t go home again: iTunes is awful these days, and Apple Music is like putting your music in jail. I have to admit that I don’t get the point of Spotify, and YouTube Music has re-branded so many times that I have no idea what it’s called this week, or which of my music is there, or where it resides. I get access to Amazon Music Unlimited via my prime subscription, so I’ve taken the path of least resistance.
This decision got tabled until next year–again.
General Purpose AI
As I mentioned, I have settled on Claude for my main paid LLM subscription, but Google Gemini is getting hard to ignore, particularly for image processing. I’m guessing that, sometime this year, I will be upgrading my Google subscriptions for access to its AI. But meanwhile, Claude writes code like a superhero.
Password Manager
I have been paying for Dashlane for years, while also having access to password management through both Google and Apple. I still don’t entirely get passkeys, and authenticator apps require you to have your mobile devices surgically attached so you can access them at all times. I am probably not the only person who has tried to access an online service while on the road, only to have it demand that I authenticate on another device–which is currently in another country. So, I’m not ready to let go of Dashlane quite yet.
I suspect this special purpose app will eventually get eclipsed as well. But mainly, it is a good way to share access with my husband. Until you have to access a loved one’s accounts in an emergency, you don’t know how important this is. I’m keeping my passwords platform-independent for now.
The Bottom Line
All told, I have only saved, at most, $50 a month on my subscription costs by making these updates. (Over half of that was Adobe.) Given I use most of them for my work, that’s not a lot. But pausing to re-evaluate them was useful. My key insight from this year is that many of the specialized tools I was paying for are being superseded by more general, more powerful AI assistants and integrated platforms.
The lesson isn’t that specialized tools are bad—it’s that the landscape has shifted dramatically in the past year, and will continue to do so in the next years to come. AI assistants can now handle tasks that used to require dedicated apps. Cloud platforms have matured to the point where they can replace entire software suites.
I am mindful that this situation is probably not sustainable. The general AI platforms are hemorrhaging money, and I am not confident they can be made profitable without drastic increases in fees–which in turn may drive users back to specialized platforms. But I have always looked at the massive losses of unicorns as a wealth transfer from venture investors to users, and that’s fine with me, at least for now.
