I cut $5,988 a year off my own stack first

Before I offered to audit anyone else's bill, I ran the audit on myself. These are the line items, with dates.

Every "AI cost consultant" claims they can find savings. Almost none will show you their own. So here is mine: what I was paying, what I moved to, and the date it happened. The same method — read the invoice, find the tier you're not using, move the seat that doesn't earn — is what I run on a business that hires me. If I find nothing, you pay nothing. If I find something, I take 30% of what it saves.

The receipts

Line item	What changed	Saved/yr
Ayrshare social publishing	$299/mo Launch Plan cancelled. Retries finally stopped 15 Oct 2026 after four failed charges.	$3,588
Temporal workflow infra	$100/mo flat base → Developer plan, $0 base, usage only. Switched 07 Oct 2026. September card bill: $0.00.	$1,200
Anthropic Max model access	Seat cancelled 27 Aug 2026. Same work runs on pay-per-token and on models that cost a tenth as much.	$1,200+
Google Workspace seats	Cancellation scheduled 02 Oct 2026 at ~$7.20/user/mo — seats that never send mail.	scheduled

$5,988

a year, off four line items

About $499/month that was leaving the business for nothing I still use. One line item — Ayrshare — was worth more than most small businesses spend on AI in a year.

Why the timing matters

The model market repriced twice in the last 24 hours. On 16 Oct one model's input price fell 92.5%; on 17 Oct the same input rose 1,227%. If your bill was set on last quarter's numbers, it is wrong — in one direction or the other.

What the audit actually looks at

Tier mismatch. Enterprise or flat-rate plans sitting under usage a free or usage-only tier already covers. This is usually the biggest single line.
Model routing. Paying frontier prices for classification, extraction, summarising and formatting — work that a model at a tenth of the price does indistinguishably.
Zombie seats. Licences attached to people who left, or to a workflow that was replaced six months ago.
Duplicate tooling. Two products doing the same job because two teams bought separately.
Renewal terms. Auto-renew clauses, seat minimums, and annual commitments that no longer match headcount.

The terms, plainly

1. You send the bills

AI and software invoices, last three months. Redact what you like — I need line items and quantities, not account numbers.

2. I return a written cut list

Every saving, the exact change, and what it breaks if anything. No saving, no fee — you owe nothing for a null result.

3. You keep 70%

I take 30% of the verified annual saving, monthly, for as long as it holds. If the saving disappears, so does my fee.

Send three months of bills for a free read

Every number in this audit comes from the same public log: what each AI model costs today and what moved overnight — AI Price Watch →. There is a calculator that takes your spend and seats and returns an annual figure, and a free 30-minute clinic for groups. Firms that cannot send audio to a cloud should look at local transcription →

Amounts are my own invoices and cancellations, dated. No client figures appear on this page and none would be published without written permission. The Ayrshare cancellation confirmation is in my inbox; the Temporal and Anthropic changes are visible on the respective billing pages.