Paying for a Tool You Use Twice a Month

The monthly figure is the wrong number

Thirty dollars a month sounds small, which is exactly why these decisions get made badly.

The useful figure is what each actual use costs you.

Twice a month is fifteen dollars a use; twice a week is under four; twice since January is a hundred and eighty each.

Same subscription, three completely different decisions, and only the last one is obvious.

Then ask what the use was worth

Since cost per use only matters against the value.

A use that saved an hour of your time is worth having at almost any of those figures.

A use that saved five minutes on something you could have written yourself is not worth fifteen dollars.

And a use that produced something you would not otherwise have made at all, such as a page you had been avoiding for a year, is worth considerably more than the time it took.

So the question is two-part: how often, and worth what.

Most people answer neither and judge on whether thirty dollars feels like a lot.

The particular risk this year

• Many new tools arriving at once.
• All priced at a similar small monthly figure.
• Each trialled with genuine enthusiasm.
• None formally abandoned.
• Six of them by the autumn.

The last is the outcome. Six tools at thirty dollars is more than two thousand dollars a year, arrived at through six reasonable individual decisions, none of which anybody would defend as a group.

Count the uses honestly

Which requires looking rather than remembering.

Most of these tools show your history, so you can count what you actually did last month.

People consistently overestimate this, because the memorable uses are the good ones and the weeks of not opening it are not memorable at all.

Count for one month before deciding, which is the only reliable input.

Then divide, and look at the figure rather than at the monthly price.

That number settles most of these decisions in about four minutes.

A worked example

A business subscribed to a writing tool in January and was still paying in March.

Checking the history showed nine uses in the first fortnight and four in the six weeks since.

Of those four, three had saved perhaps ten minutes each and one had produced a page they had been putting off for months.

They kept it, on the strength of the fourth, and set a note to look again in June.

A second tool subscribed to in the same week had been opened twice since February, both times to see whether it was useful.

That one was cancelled, and the ten minutes of counting was what made both decisions obvious.

Trial deliberately, with an end date

Since the failure is not trying things, it is not stopping.

When you subscribe to something new, put a date in the calendar six weeks out to decide.

Write down at the same time what you expect to use it for, which gives you something to judge against.

Six weeks is long enough to know and short enough that abandoning it costs little.

Without that date, the decision never gets made and the default is to keep paying.

That single habit prevents most of what the annual subscription audit exists to clean up.

Consider paying per use instead

An option that fits occasional use better and is frequently available.

Several of these tools offer usage-based access as well as a subscription, where you pay for what you actually consume.

For twice-a-month use that is usually cheaper by a wide margin.

It requires slightly more setup, which is why the subscription is what most people take.

Worth asking about where a tool is genuinely useful and genuinely occasional, since that combination is common.

Share rather than duplicating

A cheaper answer where more than one person wants a tool.

Two people each subscribing individually is the common outcome, and a business plan with two seats is frequently less.

It also gives you one place to see what is being used and one thing to cancel when the time comes, rather than two accounts nobody has the login for.

Ask who has subscribed to what, since in most small businesses nobody has ever asked and the answers overlap more than anybody expects them to.

Expensing a personal subscription is how most of this starts and why it is invisible, since it never appears as a company account anywhere.

Watch the annual plans

A specific trap worth naming, since these tools push hard on it.

Paying yearly saves a couple of months and commits you before you know whether the tool is useful, which is exactly backwards for something new.

It also removes the monthly moment where the charge appears on the statement and somebody might question it.

Pay monthly through the trial period and switch to annual only once a tool has survived two review dates.

The discount is real and it is not worth buying a year of something you will stop using in March.

The counter-case

Cancelling too readily has its own cost.

A tool used twice a month for something valuable is cheap, and cancelling it to save thirty dollars while billing at a hundred an hour is poor arithmetic.

Occasional use also rises once something becomes a habit rather than an experiment, so cancelling in month two can be premature.

And the trial period is genuinely how you find out, so some waste there is the cost of finding the useful ones rather than a failure of discipline.

Count the actual uses, divide, ask what each was worth, and put a decision date on anything new.

The four minutes

1. Open the usage history.
2. Count last month's uses.
3. Divide the price by that.
4. Ask what each use was worth.
5. Ask about usage-based pricing.
6. Check nobody else pays for the same.
7. Diarise a date for anything new.

Step seven is what stops this recurring, since the reason six subscriptions accumulate is that nobody ever set a moment to decide about the first one.

The annual version of this is covered in subscriptions you are still paying for.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.