First I audited my own stack. Then I moved it.
Every money figure on this page comes from my own books. I ran this audit and this migration on my own business, where I could count everything and keep the receipts. Here's what an honest one looks like.
No client money result appears anywhere on this site. None has been measured to my standard yet, and I won't invent one. When a client's number exists, it goes up the same way everything here does: with a method and a date.
Until then, the money on this page is my own. Which also means nobody rounded it up for a brochure.
The audit
Automations that had run in the last 30 days
The dashboard looked busy. The export said otherwise. Everything else was furniture with a subscription attached, and I'd been paying for it for years.
Zombie automations, still holding people
Holding 14,392 contacts mid-sequence: people who'd entered an automation that was never going to move them again. Nobody noticed, because nothing was visibly broken. I'd say that's the quiet failure mode of these platforms.
A year of subscriptions, cut
6 tools replaced with small systems I own outright. Each cancellation sits in the ledger below with the tool named, and every line is a cancelled bill.
The migration
Contacts archived from the old platform
The honest split: 9,468 still active, 26,997 unsubscribed, 661 bounced. The platform billed on the whole number. I only ever needed the first one.
Import errors
9,446 active contacts went into the new platform in one weekend, start to finish, and the import log is kept.
A month, before and after
Same list, same emails going out. about £7,000 a year saved on the email platform alone.
The archive, still queryable
Nothing was thrown away. The full history sits in a local database, 43 tables, that I can still query today, and it's mine outright.
Trapped in an expensive tool because moving feels too risky? That's the exact job I do without drama. Mine took one weekend, and the import log is kept.
Subtraction first, build second
No new tools, nothing for your team to learn. I audit what you're already paying for, show you what's actually running, and cut what isn't. In my own case the saving landed before anything new was built.
Then, if a build is worth doing, it's funded out of money you were already spending. And sometimes the answer after the audit is that you don't need a build at all. I'd rather tell you that than sell you one.