It started as a joke in our team chat: someone asked what everyone pays for dev tools out of pocket, and the answers kept climbing. Mine, once I actually added it up, was $340 a month. For a solo developer. Not counting anything my employer pays for.
An IDE with an AI assistant. A second AI assistant in the terminal, because the first one wasn’t great at shell work. Three API keys with monthly credit auto-top-ups. Two hosting platforms — one for old side projects, one for new ones. A database-as-a-service for a project with eleven users. CI minutes. An error tracker. A logging service. A domain-renewal pile that deserves its own support group.
Here’s the audit that got it down to just over $100, without losing anything I actually use.
The three categories that hide the waste
Going line by line, every subscription fell into one of three buckets:
1. Paying for parallel tools that do the same job. I had two AI coding assistants, two hosting platforms, and both an error tracker and a logging SaaS whose free tiers overlap almost entirely for my traffic volume. Consolidation is boring advice, but the numbers aren’t: picking one assistant and one platform saved $68/month on its own. The trick that made it painless — a two-week trial where I forced myself to use only the tool I was leaning toward cancelling. Twice, the “loser” turned out to be the one I preferred.
2. Paying flagship prices for hobby workloads. My side project with eleven users ran on a managed Postgres tier designed for production apps — $19/month to store 40 MB of data. It now lives in SQLite on the same VPS as the app, backed up by a cron job to object storage that costs pennies. The lesson generalises: infrastructure pricing assumes you’re a business. If your project isn’t one, a $5 VPS plus boring open-source software covers a shocking amount of ground.
3. Paying for the free tier’s phantom ceiling. I upgraded my CI plan a year ago during a heavy month and never looked back. Actual usage since: under the free tier’s limit in ten of twelve months. Same story with the logging service. I’d been paying for headroom I used twice a year. Downgrading and accepting a rare slow month: $41/month back.
The open-source substitutions that stuck
Not everything needs a SaaS. Three swaps that survived contact with reality:
- Uptime monitoring → a self-hosted Uptime Kuma instance on the VPS I already pay for
- Screenshot/screen-recording tool subscription → the built-in OS tools I’d never bothered to learn, plus OBS for the rare complex case
- Paid API-mocking service → a 40-line Express server checked into the repo where it belongs
Two swaps that didn’t stick, for honesty’s sake: self-hosted error tracking (the maintenance overhead beat the subscription cost within a month) and a self-hosted password vault (some things I want a company with an on-call rotation to run). Self-hosting is a trade of money for attention. Spend that attention only where the maintenance is genuinely near zero.
The system that prevents relapse
The audit is the easy part. Staying clean required two habits:
- Every subscription goes through a virtual card with a monthly limit. New tool wants payment details? It gets a fresh virtual number. When I stop using the tool, I kill the card instead of hunting through account-settings mazes for the cancel button.
- A
subscriptions.mdfile in my dotfiles repo. Every paid tool, its cost, its renewal date, and one line on why it earns its keep. If I can’t write that line, the tool is already dead. The file gets reviewed whenever I pay the January domain renewals — once a year, when the pain of billing is freshest.
Total damage now: $104/month, and honestly the stack got better — fewer dashboards, fewer duplicate notifications, fewer places where a breach could expose a card number.
Your number is probably not $340. But if you’ve never added it up, it’s probably not what you think, either.