How to Audit Your AI Stack (Before You Buy Anything Else)

An AI stack audit is 30 minutes of listing what you pay for, what job each tool holds, and which tools have no job — then cancelling those. That’s the entire method. Most operators who do it find 2–4 subscriptions doing nothing and at least one pair doing the same thing. Here’s the pass, step by step.

Step 1: Inventory (10 minutes)

List every AI tool you pay for or use weekly. Check your card statement — the forgotten $19/month subscriptions live there, not in your memory. For each one write exactly three things:

1. Name and monthly cost
2. The job — one sentence, starting with a verb
3. Last time it did that job — a date, honestly

If you can’t write sentence 2, you’ve already found a cut.

Step 2: The three verdicts (10 minutes)

Every tool gets exactly one:

• KEEP — has a job, did it this week. No action.
• CUT — no job, or hasn’t done its job in 30 days. Cancel today, not “after I give it another chance.” Demos are dopamine. Systems are leverage.
• CONSOLIDATE — the job is real, but another KEEP tool already does it. Two writing assistants, two image generators, three note apps: pick the better one, cancel the other, move on.

Step 3: Map the gaps (10 minutes)

Now look at your actual workflow — the thing you do to make money — and walk it end to end. Where does work slow down, get done manually, or not get done at all? That’s a gap. Common ones:

• Research happens in 20 browser tabs → a research seat (Perplexity)
• Meetings produce no record → a memory seat (Otter)
• Data moves between tools by copy-paste → a glue seat (Zapier or n8n)

Fill one gap. Not three. The audit’s discipline is the same as the stack’s: every addition must have a job before it has a login.

What good looks like

A finished audit fits on one page: 5–10 tools, each with a one-sentence job, zero overlaps, one planned addition. If your page is longer than that, run Step 2 again and be meaner.

A clearer stack beats a bigger stack. Audit quarterly — tools drift, jobs change, and the stack that was clean in January is cluttered by July.