The Tools I Actually Pay For (and the Ones I Cancelled)

Every side hustle blog has a "my favorite tools" post. Most of them are affiliate-link dumps for software the writer signed up for once, screenshotted, and never opened again.

This is the honest version: the exact things that actually leave my bank account to run this blog and my exam-prep apps. What I pay every month, what I pay once a year, what I only pay for when I need it — and the ones I paid for, tried, and cancelled, because a wasted subscription is a receipt too.

What I pay for every month

That's about $122 a month, and I want to be honest about the shape of it: $90 of that is Replit alone.

Replit is my single biggest cost by a wide margin, and it's the one I question the least. It's not hosting a blog — it's running actual web applications, the exam-prep sites, which is a different thing from parking some HTML somewhere. That $90 is a business expense against something that earns, not a blog cost.

Claude is how a stay-at-home parent with no formal coding background builds and ships software at all. Seventeen dollars a month for the thing that turns "I have an idea for a practice-test app" into a live site is the most obvious money I spend.

Canva Pro at $15/month runs the entire visual side — the Pinterest pins, the product mockups, the printables, the headers on these posts. It's also cheaper annually ($120/year, roughly $10/month), which is the way to pay for it if you know you're keeping it.

What I pay for once a year

Domains — GoDaddy. Each domain runs about $13 a year, plus roughly $25 a year for the privacy protections. That sounds trivial until you remember I run more than one — the blog plus the exam-prep sites — so this line multiplies with every project. It's small per domain and real in aggregate.

What I pay for only when I need it

Resend — $20/month, occasionally. I run on the free tier most of the time. I only upgrade to the paid plan when a specific email push for the exam-prep sites needs the volume, then I'm back to free. Listing it as a flat monthly cost would be dishonest — it's a sometimes cost, not a standing one.

What I paid for and cancelled

Here's the part the affiliate-link posts never include: the money I spent on things that didn't work out.

ElevenLabs — $20, cancelled. I signed up to do AI voiceover for the faceless YouTube revival. It just wasn't the right fit for what I actually needed, so I cancelled it. Not a knock on the tool — a knock on me for subscribing before I was sure.

A rotating cast of one-month trials. I've paid for a handful of other things for a single month, poked at them, and cancelled before the second charge. That's the real process of building a stack: you pay for some things that don't stick, and the skill is cancelling fast instead of letting a dead subscription quietly bleed you for a year.

The honest total

Constant monthly tools: about $122, dominated by Replit. Add annual domains and the occasional Resend month on top.

Set against the blog's current revenue — which, as I reported in my month-two update, is $0 — the tools cost more than the blog makes. That's not alarming; it's just month two. And the biggest line, Replit, is carrying the exam-prep apps, which do earn. The blog is the loss leader; the apps are the business.

The actual takeaway is how short this list is. Three monthly subscriptions do about ninety percent of the work. I'm not running thirty tools, and neither should you. Most "essential tool" lists are long because they're monetized, not because you need thirty things. You need a few you actually open every day, and the discipline to cancel the rest before the renewal hits.

None of the links above are affiliate links. When some of these programs approve me, I may add them — with a clear disclosure — but I'm not going to pretend a tool is essential just because it pays me to say so. That's the whole reason this blog exists.

What's the subscription you're paying for right now and not using? Go cancel it, then hit reply and tell me what it was. I'll start.