Why Your Business Pays $1,200/Month for Software You Barely Use

You're Paying for 25 Tools. Using 6 Well. Actually Need 3.

Open your credit card statement. Scroll past the obvious stuff. Count the software charges.

Wix. HubSpot. Calendly. Mailchimp. Stripe. QuickBooks. 7shifts. Google Workspace. Canva. Hootsuite. Zoom. Slack. And that one thing you signed up for in November that you used twice.

If you're like most small business owners in Canada, you're running somewhere between 10 and 20 software subscriptions. You signed up for each one because it solved a specific problem. A scheduling tool here. An email marketing platform there. A CRM because someone told you that you needed one.

Each tool cost "just" $15 or $35 or $50 a month. Reasonable on its own. But stack them up, and you're bleeding.

The Subscription Math Nobody Wants to Do

Let's walk through a real software stack for a service-based small business. Nothing exotic. Just the basics.

• Website builder (Wix Business): $23/month
• CRM (HubSpot Starter): $50/month
• Scheduling (Calendly Pro): $12/month
• Email marketing (Mailchimp Standard): $35/month
• Payment processing (Stripe fees): ~$80/month on $3,000 revenue
• Accounting (QuickBooks Simple Start): $90/month
• Staff scheduling (7shifts): $35/month
• Email and storage (Google Workspace): $14/month
• Social media (Hootsuite): $49/month
• Video calls (Zoom Pro): $16/month

Total: $404/month. $4,848/year.

And that's the conservative version. Plenty of businesses hit $800 to $1,200 a month once you add project management tools, form builders, review management, loyalty programs, and whatever else got pitched at you on Instagram.

For a business doing $10,000 a month in revenue, that's 5-12% going straight to software companies. Before rent. Before payroll. Before you pay yourself.

The 40% Problem

Here's the part that stings.

Research from Productiv and Zylo consistently shows that small businesses use about 40% of the features in their software subscriptions. You're paying full price for tools where more than half the functionality sits there collecting dust.

That CRM you bought? You use it to store contact info. It has a full marketing automation suite, lead scoring, pipeline management, and reporting dashboards you've never opened.

That email platform? You send a newsletter once a month. It has A/B testing, customer journeys, predictive sending, and behavioral triggers you didn't know existed.

You're not lazy. You're overwhelmed. Nobody has time to master 15 different platforms when they're also running a business, managing staff, and dealing with customers.

So you use the basics of everything and the full power of nothing.

The Price Hike Cycle

It gets worse. Because these companies don't just charge you -- they raise prices. Regularly. Aggressively. And usually right after you've built your entire workflow around their tool.

Mindbody went from around $100/month to over $700/month for many fitness studios. Not over ten years. Over two or three pricing changes. Studios that had built their entire booking, payments, and client management on Mindbody had two options: pay up or start over.

ServiceTitan charges $200+ per technician per month for home service businesses. A plumbing company with 5 techs is paying $12,000+ a year for scheduling and dispatch software.

HubSpot starts free. Then $50. Then $890/month for Professional. Then $3,600/month for Enterprise. Each tier gates features you'll eventually need behind a paywall that grows every year.

The pattern is always the same:

1. Low introductory price to get you in the door
2. You build your workflow around the tool
3. Price goes up
4. You're too deep to switch
5. Repeat

This isn't a bug. It's the business model.

Why You Can't Cancel

You've thought about switching. Everyone has. Then you realize what it actually takes.

Your data is trapped. Three years of customer records, booking history, email lists, and transaction data live inside these platforms. Exporting is either impossible, limited, or gives you a CSV file that doesn't map to anything else.

Your integrations break. That Zapier connection between your CRM and your email tool and your booking system? Cancel one, and the whole chain falls apart. Now you're rebuilding automations from scratch.

Your team has to relearn everything. You spent six months getting your staff comfortable with the current system. Switching means training all over again. Lost productivity. Mistakes. Frustration.

Your customers feel it. New booking links. New payment portals. New login pages. Every switch creates friction for the people paying you.

So you stay. You absorb the price increase. You rationalize it. "It's just $20 more a month." Multiply that across 12 tools and 12 months.

This is vendor lock-in, and it's designed this way.

The Real Cost Isn't the Money

The dollar amount matters. But the hidden cost is worse.

Context switching. Your team jumps between 8 browser tabs, 4 mobile apps, and 3 different login credentials throughout the day. Every switch costs focus. Studies show it takes an average of 23 minutes to fully refocus after switching tasks.

Data silos. Your CRM doesn't talk to your booking tool. Your booking tool doesn't talk to your accounting software. You have customer information scattered across platforms with no single source of truth.

Decision paralysis. When your data lives in 15 places, you can't get a clear picture of your business. Revenue is in QuickBooks. Leads are in HubSpot. Bookings are in Calendly. Website traffic is in Google Analytics. Putting it all together requires manual work that rarely happens.

You're paying more to know less about your own business.

What the Fix Actually Looks Like

The answer isn't "use fewer tools and accept less functionality." That's going backwards.

The answer is one platform that does what matters, integrated from the ground up.

Not 25 tools bolted together with Zapier. One system where the website, CRM, booking, payments, email marketing, invoicing, and analytics all live in the same place. Where data enters once and flows everywhere it needs to go.

When a customer books an appointment on your website:

• Their info automatically enters your CRM
• A confirmation email sends immediately
• An invoice generates
• A follow-up reminder schedules itself
• Their visit history updates for your records

No copy-paste. No Zapier. No switching between tabs. No praying that the integration doesn't break at 2 AM.

One login. One bill. One place to check everything.

That's what we're building at Alpaca Launch. A complete business platform -- website, CRM, booking, payments, email, AI assistant -- starting at $49/month. Not $500. Not $1,200. One price for everything a small business actually needs.

How to Audit Your Software Spending Today

Before you do anything else, do this:

• Pull your credit card and bank statements for the last 3 months
• List every software subscription you're paying for
• Rate each one: essential, useful, or "why am I still paying for this?"
• Calculate the total monthly and annual cost
• Identify overlap: How many tools do the same thing?

Most business owners who do this exercise find at least $100-300/month in tools they can cut immediately. The bigger savings come from consolidation -- replacing 5-8 tools with one integrated platform.

Stop Renting Your Business Infrastructure

Every software subscription is rent. You're paying monthly for access to someone else's system, on their terms, at their price, with their rules about what happens to your data.

The subscription economy was sold as "flexibility." In practice, it's a trap. Flexible for them to raise prices. Flexible for them to change features. Flexible for them to hold your data hostage when you try to leave.

Your business deserves better than a stack of disconnected tools that cost more every year and work together less than they should.

See What One Platform Can Replace

We built Alpaca Launch for exactly this problem. One platform. One price. Everything your business needs to run -- website, CRM, booking, payments, email marketing, AI tools, and more.

No more death by subscription. No more duct-taping tools together. No more surprise price hikes on tools you can't leave.

See what Alpaca Launch replaces and find out how much you could save.

View pricing plans -- starting at $49/month for the complete platform.