Most freelancers have no idea how much they're spending on SaaS subscriptions every month. I added mine up. The number made me uncomfortable. Here's the full breakdown — and what I did about it.
Last year, a freelance developer I know — ten years of experience, steady client base, genuinely good at what he does — mentioned offhand that he was having a slow month. Revenue was down. He was trying to cut costs. One of the things on his list was "look into which subscriptions I can cancel."
I asked him how many he had. He guessed four or five. When he actually sat down and counted — bank statements, not memory — it was eleven. Eleven recurring SaaS subscriptions, most of which he hadn't consciously thought about in months. Total: just over £90 a month.
That's more than £1,000 a year. Leaving his account quietly. Automatically. Whether he was using those tools or not.
I didn't laugh. I recognised the situation entirely. In my own agency work I've seen the same stack appear over and over: Monday or Asana for projects, Pipedrive or HubSpot for the sales pipeline, Toggl for time, and something else for quotes. Four tools. Four logins. Four monthly charges. And critically — four different places to look when you're trying to understand what's actually happening in your business.
Tool subscriptions accumulate in a specific way. You sign up for something free to solve an immediate problem. A few months later, you hit the free tier limit and upgrade — it's only £8 a month, not worth the hassle of switching. Then you sign up for something else, and something else, and before long you've got half a dozen tools each solving one slice of a problem that, really, should be handled in one place.
And because each payment is small, none of them trip your mental alarm. £10 here. £7 there. The kind of money that feels trivial when it leaves your account on the 14th of the month. The kind of money that adds up to hundreds of pounds a year before you've noticed.
The particularly painful part? Most freelancers are paying for overlap. They've got a project management tool that doesn't do CRM, so they add a CRM. The CRM doesn't track time, so they add a time tracker. The time tracker doesn't integrate cleanly with their project tool, so they spend twenty minutes a week copying data between them. And all of it costs money. Every month. For the rest of your freelance career, unless you make an active decision to change it.
Having spent 25 years in digital project management and seen how freelancers operate across every kind of setup, here's what a fairly typical stack looks like — and what it actually costs:
And this is a conservative list. It doesn't include accounting software (FreeAgent is £19/mo, QuickBooks is £14/mo). It doesn't include Adobe Creative Cloud if you're a designer (£54/mo). It doesn't include Dropbox, email marketing tools, or your domain and hosting. Add those in and you're looking at well north of £100 a month for a freelancer who just wants to run their business.
The thing that bothers me most about this isn't the total — it's the reason the total gets this high. None of these tools are bad. Notion is genuinely good. Trello is perfectly decent. Toggl does what it says. The problem is that you need four or five of them to do one job: run your business. And each one only solves a piece of it.
Money is only half of it. The other cost is friction.
Every tool in your stack is another login. Another interface to remember. Another place where your data lives, in a slightly different format, not talking to the other tools. You finish a call with a new lead — do you log it in your CRM first, or update the project board first? Or just send yourself an email and deal with it later?
I've watched talented freelancers build elaborate systems for keeping multiple tools in sync. Color-coded spreadsheets that reference Notion databases that feed into Trello boards. They spend more time managing their workflow management system than actually doing the work it was supposed to support. That's not productivity. That's displacement activity dressed up in SaaS.
The friction also compounds over time. You miss a follow-up because the lead was in your CRM and the reminder was in Notion and you only opened Trello that day. You bill the wrong hours because your time tracker and your project board don't talk to each other and you forgot which task the session was for. Small misalignments that cost you time, or money, or both.
Every tool you add is another place for things to fall through the cracks. The goal isn't to use more tools. It's to have fewer gaps.
Here's something the software industry figured out a long time ago: small recurring payments are much harder to cancel than large one-off costs. The psychology works in their favour.
If you paid £120 upfront for a year of Notion, you'd think carefully before renewing. You'd evaluate whether you actually used it, whether it was worth it, whether there's a better option. But £10 a month? That just... happens. It disappears into the noise of your bank statement. You'd have to actively decide to stop it — and most people never do, because the cost of switching feels higher than the cost of continuing.
This is also why pricing pages on SaaS tools almost always show monthly cost rather than annual cost. £10/mo feels like coffee money. £120/year feels like a decision. It's the same number, shown differently, to exploit how humans perceive cost.
Multiply that across five tools and you've got a recurring annual cost that, if presented to you as a single invoice, you'd scrutinise very carefully. Drip-fed monthly, you barely notice it leaving.
The comparison above is why I find the one-time pricing model for tools like Flowboard so compelling — not just as a product positioning decision, but as a genuinely better deal for freelancers.
A tool that covers your project management, CRM, time tracking, and AI insights for £59 once breaks even against a typical subscription stack in about five weeks. After that, you're ahead. Every month after the first two is money staying in your pocket rather than leaving it.
Over five years — which is a perfectly normal lifespan for a solid desktop app — a £59 one-time purchase costs £59. A £47/month subscription stack costs £2,820. That's not a rounding error. That's a meaningful difference for a freelancer managing their own finances.
I want to be clear: I'm not saying every subscription is unjustifiable. If a tool is genuinely earning you more money than it costs, it's worth it. If Calendly is saving you an hour a week of back-and-forth scheduling emails, at £8 a month that's probably fine. But most freelancers I talk to are paying for subscriptions that are nice-to-have, not business-critical. Ones they signed up for during a busy period and never got around to cancelling.
Go to your bank statement — not your memory — and write down every SaaS subscription that left your account in the last 90 days. Include everything: Dropbox, cloud storage, design tools, scheduling tools, productivity apps. Then answer three questions for each one:
1. Did I use this tool this week? Not "would I use it if I needed to." Did I actually open it and do something in it?
2. Does this tool overlap with something else I'm paying for? Two tools both doing "notes and docs" is one tool too many.
3. If this tool doubled its price tomorrow, would I still keep it? That's a useful test of how genuinely essential something is versus just convenient.
You'll probably find at least one or two things you can cut immediately. More importantly, you'll see the overlap — the places where you're paying for three tools to do the job of one.
When you strip it back to what genuinely matters, the core tools for a freelancer come down to three things: accounting software (non-negotiable — invoicing and tax), cloud storage for client deliverables (necessary for the work itself), and one tool for everything to do with running the business — project boards, CRM, time tracking, and the AI insights that flag where things are going off track before they actually do.
That's the thinking behind Flowboard. The combination of PM + CRM + time tracking in one offline desktop app replaces three separate subscriptions — not because the individual tools are bad, but because having them scattered means paying three times for coverage of one business function, and spending time maintaining connections between tools that never quite work properly anyway.
The cleaner your tool stack, the less mental overhead. Every tool you cut is one fewer interface to remember, one fewer login to manage, one fewer place where client data lives. That simplicity compounds. It makes you faster, clearer, and surprisingly less stressed about the admin side of your business.
One more thing worth saying: be careful with "free" tiers. They're not really free. They're paid for either in functionality limits that push you to upgrade, or in your data being used to train their models or improve their product. Sometimes both.
HubSpot's free CRM is genuinely good — I'm not criticising it specifically — but the entire point of the free tier is to get your data into their ecosystem so that when you eventually need a feature it doesn't have, upgrading feels like the obvious move. The free plan is the acquisition cost. You're not their charity case. You're their funnel.
Offline-first tools don't have this problem. If your data lives on your machine, there's no server to pay for, no bandwidth bill, no incentive to monetise what you're doing in the app. The business model is simple: you pay once for the software, and then it's yours. That straightforwardness has real value that's easy to overlook when you're comparing features on a pricing page.
Do the audit. Add it up honestly. I'm willing to bet you'll find at least £30–50 a month going out to tools you could replace, consolidate, or cut entirely. For a freelancer, that's not nothing — that's a client dinner, or a hardware upgrade, or four hours of your time you didn't have to bill for.
The goal isn't to be cheap about your tools. It's to be deliberate. Pay for what earns its keep. Cut what doesn't. And when you have a choice between a recurring cost and a one-time purchase that does the same job well, understand that over any meaningful timescale, the maths almost always favours owning over renting.
If you want to see what combining your project management, CRM, time tracking, and AI insights into a single desktop app looks like — the kind of thing that replaces three or four subscriptions rather than adding to them — Flowboard is worth a look. Built for exactly the scenario I've described here.
Flowboard combines project management, CRM, time tracking, and AI insights in one offline desktop app. £59 one-time. No monthly fees. No per-seat pricing. No subscriptions, ever.
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