Case study · Tools · Costs · Simplicity
From 10 tools
to 5.
Ten different tools, each doing a piece of the job, each with its own login and its own bill. Half of them overlapped. Now there are five, and they talk to each other.
Problem
Ten overlapping tools, each with its own login, bill and copy of the data.
Solution
Five tools that talk to each other: exactly half.
- 10 → 5
- tools, exactly half
- 2 → 1
- CRMs
- 0
- automation platforms left to pay for
Before
- Automations: Zapier and n8n.
- Customers: two different CRMs.
- Website: a hosting server, a page builder and premium plugins.
- Everything else: Trello, Mailchimp and Google Sheets.
The problem
Every tool had its own login, its own bill and its own copy of part of the data. Things got copied between them by hand, or by automations that broke quietly.
After
- One CRM for customers.
- Brevo for emails.
- Cloudflare for the website and the automations.
- Google Sheets, still the team's day-to-day interface.
- Google Cloud for the heavier data work.
That would trade ten dependencies for one big one. Five simple tools that talk to each other are easier to change. No single tool controls the entire business.
Outcome
Exactly half the tools. Fewer logins, fewer bills, and fewer places where data gets out of sync.
What I'd do differently
List every subscription and what it's actually used for before touching anything. The overlaps become obvious on paper.
“Every tool you add is one more place for things to break.”