Apps & Tools

Software comparisons and buying decisions: recurring costs, workflow tradeoffs, and what it takes to leave a tool.

Choosing software means deciding what you need it to do, what you will pay as usage grows, and how you would leave. The articles below cover tool comparisons, pricing audits, and migration decisions. Start with the pricing checklist if you are evaluating a trial, the stack audit if you already have too many subscriptions, or a product comparison when your shortlist is ready.

The Day You Outgrow a Project Tool's Free Tier

Six project tools, one spreadsheet: I checked each free plan's actual limit and what the smallest paid tier costs per seat, per year. The surprises are in the climbing costs.

Mia CarterSep 11 — 7 min read

Scheduling Links Compared: What "Free" Actually Lets You Book, and What a Year Really Costs

Compared the free plans and yearly cost of Calendly, Cal.com, SavvyCal and TidyCal. One caps you at one event type, one is free forever, one has none.

Alex NovakSep 11 — 7 min read

Newsletter Platforms: What "Free" Actually Gets You Before You Pay

I checked the free tiers on Mailchimp, Kit, Buttondown, MailerLite and Beehiiv. One caps you at 100 subscribers, another at 10,000, and "free" hides four different kinds of limits.

Tom ByrneSep 10 — 6 min read

Password Managers: What the Free Tier Actually Gives You, and What the First Paid Tier Costs

I opened the pricing pages for Bitwarden, 1Password, Dashlane and NordPass so you don't have to. Here is what each free plan really includes, where it stops, and what going paid costs a year.

Tom ByrneSep 9 — 6 min read

How Much Cloud Storage Is Actually Free, and What the Next Dollar Buys

Seven cloud services, compared: what the free tier really gives you, what the first paid tier costs a year, and why a 5 GB default is an upsell.

Mia CarterSep 8 — 6 min read

The Annual Discount Is a Loan You Make to Your Vendor

Twenty percent off for paying yearly sounds like free money. Priced as what it actually is — an interest-free loan with a cancellation penalty — it is a much narrower deal.

Mia CarterSep 2 — 3 min read

Cloudflare Pages vs Netlify for a Small Marketing Site, Including the Bill at Month Six

Both deploy a static site in ten minutes. The differences show up in build minutes, redirect handling, and one caching behaviour that cost me two hours to understand.

Tom ByrneSep 1 — 3 min read

We Tried to Cut Every Tool for a Month and Learned Which Four We Actually Cannot

An audit tells you what you pay for. Turning each one off for a week tells you what you need. The results did not match my predictions in six cases out of fourteen.

Mia CarterSep 1 — 3 min read

We Left a Tool We Still Liked, Because Liking It Was Not the Question

The hardest software decisions are not about bad products. Here is the framework we used to leave something that worked fine, and why "it works fine" is not a reason to stay.

Tom ByrneSep 1 — 3 min read

We Replaced Four Tools With Notion and Got Two of Them Back

Consolidating onto Notion saved us $91 a month and cost us something harder to price. A year later, here is exactly which parts stuck and which we quietly reversed.

Tom ByrneAug 24 — 3 min read

The Real Cost of Moving a Team Off a Tool Is Not the Migration

We budgeted two weeks for the data and got it done in three days. Then spent five weeks on the part nobody schedules — every integration, habit, and link that pointed at the old thing.

Mia CarterAug 22 — 3 min read

The SaaS Pricing Audit I Run Before Any Trial (It Caught a $4,200 Surprise)

A 20-minute checklist for finding the real cost of a SaaS tool before you start a trial — seats, add-ons, overage, and the traps pricing pages hide.

Mia CarterAug 20 — 4 min read

Figma vs Penpot, Run in Parallel on the Same Client Project for Five Weeks

We rebuilt the same twenty-screen deliverable twice, once in each tool, and timed it. The gap is real but it is not where the comparison articles put it.

Tom ByrneAug 15 — 3 min read

The Quarterly Stack Audit That Takes Ninety Minutes and Has Never Not Paid For Itself

A repeatable process for going through every piece of software a small team pays for, in one sitting, with a decision at the end of each line.

Mia CarterAug 14 — 3 min read

Per-Seat Pricing Has a Number Nobody Quotes You, and It's the One That Grows

The list price per seat is the least interesting figure on a pricing page. Here is the arithmetic that actually predicts what a tool costs a growing team in year two.

Tom ByrneAug 14 — 3 min read

Six Months on Linear, Including the Two Weeks We Nearly Went Back

Linear is fast in a way that changes how a team files work. It is also opinionated in ways that cost us a fortnight — here is what held up after half a year of real use.

Mia CarterAug 9 — 3 min read