I went through my bank statements at the start of 2026 to do my usual January “what am I actually paying for” pass. Turns out I’d added eight paid software things in 2025, and dropped four others I’d been paying for since 2023. Net spend went up about $32 a month. Most of it I think is worth it. Some of it definitely isn’t, and I’m flagging it here so I’ll cancel it before I write next year’s version of this post.

This is just the software stuff. Hardware is a separate conversation. So is hosting, which lives in its own messy spreadsheet and I’m not going to pretend I have it under control.

Plausible Analytics – $9 a month

I switched from Google Analytics to Plausible in March 2025 and it’s the change I’d recommend most to anyone who runs a small site. The dashboard is a single page, loads instantly, and tells me everything I actually use (top pages, top referrers, country breakdown, search terms when GSC is connected). The cookie banner went away because Plausible doesn’t use cookies. The tracking script is something like 1KB.

$9 a month, billed annually, for sites under 10k pageviews. I’m at maybe 6,500. There are cheaper open-source self-hosted alternatives (Umami, Counter, GoatCounter) and I tried the self-host route in 2024. The hosting and update overhead wasn’t worth saving the $9 for me. Your situation may differ. Either way, ditching Google Analytics 4 was one of the best small decisions I made all year.

iA Writer – $50 (Mac, one-time, kind of)

I’ve been using iA Writer since 2014. The Mac app is paid up-front, around $50 last I checked, no subscription. I bought a fresh license in 2025 because I’d lost track of which Apple ID had the old one and it was simpler to just rebuy. Worth every penny. It’s a Markdown editor with no preview clutter, beautiful typography, and a workflow that gets out of the way. I write everything here in iA Writer first, then paste into the CMS.

I tried Obsidian for a few months. Obsidian is great if you want a knowledge base. I want a writing app. They are different things. iA Writer is a writing app. I’m staying with it.

Backblaze – $99 a year

$7 a month, $70 a year if you pay annually, $99 if you go for the two-year plan with a couple of bells. I do the annual. Unlimited backup of one Mac. Has saved me twice in the past decade, both times when an external drive went bad. Set it up once, forget about it. The web restore interface is fine. The mail-you-a-hard-drive option is a relief to know is there even if you never use it.

If you don’t have a backup strategy as someone who works on the web for a living, fix that this week. I won’t lecture but: I had a colleague lose six months of client work in 2023 because his only backup was Time Machine on a drive that died the same week his laptop SSD did. Don’t be that.

Sublime Text – $99 (one-time, finally)

I’d been using the unregistered nag-screen version of Sublime Text for, embarrassingly, about eleven years. Always meant to pay. Always didn’t. In 2025 I finally bought the license, $99 for a personal license, three years of updates included. The nag screen disappeared and I felt like a slightly better person.

VS Code is also fine. I use it for big projects with lots of language servers. For quick file editing, scratch files, working with single PHP files (which is most of my contract work), Sublime is faster, smaller, and doesn’t melt the fan when I open it. A lot of my dev workflow lives in the browser these days, but the editor is still where I spend the most time, and Sublime earns its keep.

Fastmail – $50 a year

Email hosting for my personal domain. $5 a month or $50 a year if you commit. I’ve been on Fastmail since I quit Gmail in 2022 and it’s been boring in the best way. Calendars sync, spam filtering is fine, the web interface is responsive, the iOS app works. Not flashy. That’s the point.

Namecheap – varies, around $80 a year total

For domain registration. I’m not going to pretend this is the cheapest option, but I’ve used them long enough that moving is more hassle than it’s worth. I have something like ten domains there. Renewals across 2025 came to about $80 total, more than they should be because some are .net and .dev which cost more, and one is a vanity .io that I should probably let lapse but won’t.

Things I canceled in 2025

Notion. I had a $10/month personal plan since 2022. Canceled in May. Notion has gotten slower, more bloated, and more interested in being an everything-app than a useful notes tool. The straw was when a 200-page page took six seconds to load. I moved my notes to a folder of plain Markdown files that I sync via iCloud. They open instantly. They will still open in twenty years. Net saving: $120 a year.

An AI writing assistant I’m not going to name. $20/month. Used it for about four months in early 2025. The output was fine for first-drafting, but I noticed my own prose getting blander after a few weeks of editing AI drafts instead of writing my own from zero. The trade was bad – marginally faster drafting, real cost to my voice. I stopped paying in June. My writing time per post went up by about an hour. The posts got better.

A project management SaaS that shall also remain nameless. $15/month. I was a team of one. I was using it as a glorified to-do list. I switched to a plain text file called todo.txt on my desktop and have not missed a single feature. Saved $180 a year and feel slightly silly about how long that took.

Adobe Creative Cloud Photography Plan. $10/month. I used Lightroom maybe twice in 2025. I take photos with my phone like a normal person now. Canceled in August. If I ever need to do real photo editing again I’ll re-up.

What I’m trialing in 2026

I’ve started a trial of a self-hosted git server (Forgejo) for personal projects, instead of paying GitHub for private repos I don’t need to share. I’ll see how that goes. Also looking at a paid Pinboard for bookmarks, which is something like $22 a year for the archiving plan, which is a lot for a bookmarking service in 2026 but still cheaper than the alternatives I’ve found.

Total monthly software spend, post-cancellations: about $42 a month including the annualised costs. Down slightly from where it was at the start of 2025 despite adding Plausible and Fastmail. Letting things go is, generally, the move.

One more rule, learned the hard way over twenty years: if you haven’t logged into a paid tool in 30 days, cancel it. You can always come back. The friction of resubscribing is a feature, not a bug, because if you can’t be bothered to resubscribe you didn’t need it.