587: More Efficiency, Less Waste: How To Streamline Your Business In 2025

Podcast: Download (Duration: 40:33 — 46.7MB)

The single fastest way to cut business costs in 2025 is to audit every recurring subscription you pay for, cancel or downgrade anything you have not actively used in the last 90 days, and replace mid-tier SaaS tools with either a one-time-fee alternative or a short block of AI-generated code. In this episode of the My Wife Quit Her Job podcast, I sit down with my co-host Toni Anderson to walk through the exact “DOGE” exercise we ran on our own businesses, where we killed a $147/year page builder we had not opened in five years, moved a $1,000/month Shopify loyalty app to a $200/month alternative, and automated a Bumblebee Linens monogramming workflow that was quietly eating hours a day.

The framing is not political. We use “DOGE” to mean the same discipline any leaner economy forces on you: cut waste, kill the single points of failure, and stop paying monthly ransom for tools you no longer need.

Below you will find the exact framework we followed, the specific subscriptions we cut, the ones we deliberately kept, and how AI is now cheap enough that most $50/month Shopify apps can be replaced by a $0 script.

Key takeaways

• Audit every recurring subscription against usage. If you have not opened it in 90 days and it is not seasonal, cancel it.
• Cancelling a paid page builder like Beaver Builder does not delete your existing pages. You lose updates, not content.
• Most $50/month Shopify apps for simple sales logic or loyalty programs can be replaced by liquid code that Claude or ChatGPT will write for you in an afternoon.
• Loyalty apps get expensive fast. Smile.io’s Plus tier is $1,000/month; Appstle delivers similar functionality for under $200/month.
• Archive the exact installer version of every desktop app you rely on. Upgrading is a bigger risk than staying still 90% of the time.
• Prefer one-time-fee or lifetime plans over monthly. Jungle Scout now sells a lifetime plan around $800 that pays for itself in under two years.
• Watch your credit card notifications, not just the monthly bill. Set a Google Calendar reminder before every annual renewal.

What does it mean to “DOGE” your business?

To DOGE your business means running a top-to-bottom audit of every recurring expense, workflow, and manual task, then cutting or automating anything that is not actively earning its keep. The word is borrowed from the government cost-cutting initiative in the news, but the discipline is old: trim the fat, remove single points of failure, and stop paying for capacity you do not use.

For an ecommerce operator that usually splits into three buckets: software subscriptions, unused domains and accounts, and manual workflows that a script could handle. Each one leaks a small amount every month, and stacked together they can easily represent 10% to 20% of your operating overhead.

The goal is not to become a martyr about tooling. Canva at $12/month is worth every cent if you use it every day. The point is to force each recurring charge to justify itself, and to remove the “well, I might need it someday” tax you have been quietly paying for years.

Why is now the right time to cut business costs?

Now is the right time to cut business costs because the ecommerce economy is softening and many Amazon sellers are already feeling it. Ad costs are up, consumer spending is more cautious, and a lot of brands that grew fat during the 2020-2022 boom are carrying subscription stacks that were built for a much bigger top line.

Toni and I run the Sellers Summit and talk to a couple hundred ecommerce owners a year. The conversations in early 2025 sound noticeably more defensive than a year ago. When revenue is flat and margins are thin, every $200/month tool you can kill drops straight to the bottom line.

There is also a bigger tailwind. AI has cratered the cost of custom code, which means the pricing power of mid-tier SaaS apps has quietly collapsed. Features that used to justify $50/month in 2020 can now be replicated in an afternoon by asking Claude or ChatGPT for the code.

How to audit your business subscriptions

To audit your business subscriptions, export the last 12 months of your business credit card statements, list every recurring charge in a spreadsheet, and score each one from 1 to 10 on how badly you actually need it. Then match that score against the monthly cost. Anything scoring 3 or lower goes on the chopping block, regardless of price.

I do this at tax time every year and I always find at least one embarrassment. Last year I discovered I had been paying $19/month for a Google Workspace account for a business I no longer ran. That is a year and a half of $19 sitting there, roughly $400 for literally nothing.

The other easy find is expired free trials that quietly converted. I now set a Google Calendar reminder for the exact date I have to decide whether to keep or kill any annual renewal. Trust the reminder, not your memory.

A quarterly review beats an annual one. If you have not opened a tool in three months and it is not seasonal, add it to a watch list. If it hits six months of non-use, cancel without debate.

Which SaaS subscriptions should you cancel first?

You should cancel first any subscription that meets one of three conditions: you have not logged in for 90+ days, you are paying for capacity or features you never use, or a free or one-time-fee alternative exists that would cover 90% of your use case. Software subscriptions decay in value silently, and vendors rarely email to tell you that you have downgraded your own usage.

Here are the cuts Toni and I made recently, with the reasoning:

• Beaver Builder page builder ($147/year). Toni had been paying it for five years past her last actual use, on the mistaken assumption that cancelling would break her existing pages. It does not. You lose future updates, but every page you built stays live.
• OnlineJobs.ph ($70/month) after hiring. Toni forgot to cancel and paid four extra months on a workflow she was finished with. Set a calendar reminder the day you sign up.
• Google Workspace for a defunct business ($19/month). Mine. Dead account, dead email address, live billing.
• Jungle Scout ($500/year). I am on the fence, and probably will cancel. I am not selling on Amazon in the next two years, and Influencer Fruit covers most of what I actually need for the Amazon Influencer side.
• Smile.io loyalty program ($1,000/month at the Plus tier). Toni’s client is moving to Appstle at under $200/month, which does everything the $1,000 Smile tier does. That is $9,600/year back in the P&L for the same functionality.
• Old email marketing tools for low-usage lists. If you are broadcasting to a small list with two or three autoresponders, you probably do not need a $200/month enterprise sender.

Which subscriptions are actually worth paying for?

The subscriptions worth paying for are the ones you use every day, that meaningfully compress your time, and where the price is small relative to the value you get. Canva at roughly $12/month is the canonical example: it does the work of a junior graphic designer, exports cleanly to Google Drive or Dropbox, and costs less than one hour of freelance design per month.

I still pay for plenty of things. The rule is that the tool has to be in the daily or weekly workflow of someone in the business. Anything that only gets touched “when we get to it” fails the test.

A useful gut check: if the tool disappeared tomorrow, would you notice within a week? If the answer is no, it is a candidate to cut. If the answer is “we would grind to a halt within a day,” it is critical and probably underpriced for what it does.

How AI has changed the SaaS math for ecommerce

AI has changed the SaaS math because features that used to justify a $50/month Shopify app can now be built in an afternoon by asking Claude or ChatGPT to write the liquid code, and pasting it into your theme. The economics of most mid-tier plugins assumed you could not code. That assumption is dissolving.

A recent example from one of my students: she wanted to run a “buy one get one at a discount” promotion, and was ready to pay $50/month ($600/year) for a Shopify app that supported it. That kind of promotion logic is roughly 40 lines of liquid code. Claude will write it for free.

The rule of thumb I use now: if a SaaS tool is doing something simple and self-contained, price the AI alternative. Either write the code yourself, or pay a developer $500 to $1,000 once to set it up. You have almost always paid back the investment within 18 to 24 months versus a monthly subscription.

The prediction Toni and I both agreed on: within two years, most ecommerce owners will be able to write these small automations themselves. The people who start practicing that muscle now will have a real cost advantage over the ones who keep swiping the card every month.

Where to automate manual workflows in your ecommerce business

The best place to automate manual workflows is anywhere a human is copying data between two systems, renaming files, or performing the same 10 clicks every day. Shadow this stuff for a day before you decide what to automate. You will almost always find waste you did not know existed.

I did this at Bumblebee Linens recently. When an order comes in for a monogrammed or personalized item, someone had been manually renaming each file so the embroidery machine could display a readable label, then re-typing the personalization about 20% of the time when our conversion script failed silently. Hours a day, invisible to me because I am not in the shop day to day.

The fix was a rewrite of that conversion script using free open source tools, replacing a $300/month piece of automation software the vendor had recently jacked up in price. Same output, zero recurring cost.

The single-point-of-failure problem hiding in your business

The single-point-of-failure problem is the machine, account, subscription, or person whose disappearance would take your business down for days. In our case, one aging PC at Bumblebee Linens is still running 2012-era design software the vendor no longer supports. If that PC dies, we cannot create monogram designs, which means we cannot ship personalized orders.

Auditing for these is not the same exercise as cutting costs, but it belongs in the same review. For every mission-critical workflow, ask: what happens if this piece of software, this vendor, this contractor, this one employee is gone tomorrow?

For desktop apps I now archive the exact installer version I am running, offline, on a hard drive I control. When I updated a piece of software at Bumblebee recently, all my automation stopped working with no way to revert. Having the old installer saved would have made that recoverable in an hour.

The lifetime plan vs monthly subscription decision

The right call is almost always a lifetime plan or an annual plan over monthly, as long as you have used the tool consistently for at least six months and the annual saving is 15% or more. The mental block is fear of getting stuck with something you end up not liking, but the data on your own behavior usually refutes it. If you are still paying for a tool 24 months in, you were never going to cancel.

Jungle Scout now offers a lifetime plan around $800, versus roughly $500/year on their regular subscription. If you plan to keep using it, you break even in under two years and pay zero for the rest of the business’s life.

The risk people worry about is the vendor going out of business inside five years. Run the math: even in that worst case, you have paid less than five years of monthly. And if the tool truly is mission critical to you, that risk should push you to have a backup solution regardless.

How to shrink your cloud storage bill without deleting everything

The way to shrink a cloud storage bill without deleting everything is to identify the top 20% of files by size (usually photos and videos), then move that 20% to a hard drive you own instead of paying to keep it in Google Drive or Dropbox. You can ask Claude or ChatGPT to write a Google Drive script that lists every file over one megabyte and lets you review before deleting.

The reason storage upgrades feel inevitable is that the audit itself feels overwhelming. Ninety-five percent of the volume in a full Google Drive is usually a small number of large media files. Once you see that list, the decision to offload becomes obvious.

The other move is to be honest about what you actually need to keep. Final versions of videos, yes. Raw footage from three years ago that nobody is going to touch again, probably not, but a $60 external drive is still cheaper than years of storage upgrades.

Frequently asked questions

How much should I be spending on software subscriptions as a percentage of revenue?

There is no single right number, but a healthy ecommerce operator typically keeps recurring software costs under 3% to 5% of gross revenue. If you are above that, you are almost certainly paying for capacity you do not use. The exercise in this episode assumes most established stores have 10% to 20% of that spend that could be cut without hurting operations.

Will cancelling a page builder like Beaver Builder break my existing pages?

No. Cancelling a page builder subscription leaves every existing page live on your site. You lose access to future updates, new modules, and vendor support, but your published content keeps working exactly as it did the day you cancelled. This applies to Beaver Builder, Elementor Pro, and most WordPress page builders.

Is it safe to replace a Shopify app with AI-generated code?

For simple, self-contained features (a single promotion type, a basic discount, custom display logic) it is very safe, as long as you test in a Shopify development store first and keep a backup of your theme before pasting anything in. For anything touching payments, checkout, or customer data, either have a real developer review the code or stick with a vetted app.

What ecommerce loyalty program is cheaper than Smile.io?

Appstle is the alternative Toni’s client is moving to. Appstle’s top tier is under $200/month and covers roughly the same functionality as Smile.io’s Plus tier at $1,000/month. Yotpo Loyalty and Rise.ai are two other alternatives worth pricing if you are on a Smile plan above the $49/month starter tier.

Should I upgrade my software or stick with the version I have?

Stick with the version you have unless a specific bug, security issue, or missing feature is actively costing you time or money. Roughly 90% of the time an upgrade introduces new problems for a workflow that was already working. Always archive the current installer before upgrading so you can revert.

How do I stop forgetting to cancel free trials?

The two habits that solve this: prefer free trials that do not require a credit card, and set a Google Calendar reminder for two days before the trial ends. Turn on your credit card’s per-charge push notifications on your phone so any surprise recurring charge shows up in real time, not at end-of-month.

What is the fastest way to find subscriptions I forgot about?

The fastest way is to open your business credit card statement, export the last 12 months, and search for any recurring charge under $50 that repeats monthly. Small charges are the ones your brain filters out, and they are where the forgotten Google Workspace accounts, expired trials, and abandoned SaaS tools always hide.