Too many apps subscribtions in your business? How to cut the list down

A one hour check for shop owners paying for too many apps: what to list, what to cancel, what to keep, and when one combined tool is worth it.

10 October 2026 · The Workden team

The card statement has a line for the shop platform, one for the newsletter tool, one for the to-do app, one for the thing that connects the other things, and two you do not recognise. Each was a sensible purchase on the day. Together they are a monthly bill and six different versions of the same customer.

The short answer: do not start by shopping for a replacement. Spend an hour listing every app, what it costs, who opened it this month and what it knows about your customers. Cancel what nobody opened. Where two apps do the same job, keep the one that already holds your orders. Only then decide whether the ones left are worth combining. The steps below take you through it, and most of them cost nothing.

Step 1: find every app you pay for

Go through three months of bank and card statements, and one full year if you can, because annual renewals only show up once. Then search your inbox for "receipt", "renewal" and "invoice". Ask anyone who works with you what they have signed up for, including free plans, since a free plan still holds customer details.

Write each one on a row in a spreadsheet or on a sheet of paper:

What it is and what it costs a month
When it renews
Who opened it in the last 30 days
What it knows about a customer: their email address, their orders, what you said to them, what they clicked

That last column is the one most audits leave out, and for a shop it matters more than the price.

Step 2: cancel what nobody opened

If no one has logged in for a month and nothing depends on it running in the background, cancel it. Before you do, download your data from it. Look for an export option that saves your customer list as a file, and use it while the account is still open.

Check the renewal date first. If you have paid for a year, you can usually keep using it until the year ends, so set a reminder a week before the renewal and stop it then.

Step 3: look for two apps doing one job

This is where most of the saving is. The tools you already pay for have grown since you bought them, and one may now do the job you bought a second tool for.

Shopify is the common example. If your shop runs on it, you can already send newsletters from the same admin: Shopify's help centre says stores on its Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus plans have 10,000 free emails to send at the beginning of every month, with further emails charged at $1 per 1,000. It also lets you add a note to a customer profile that only your staff can see. A shop that sells only through Shopify and sends one newsletter a month may not need a separate email tool or a separate place for customer notes.

A dedicated email tool earns its place when you need more than that. Mailchimp, for instance, is priced in bands by the number of contacts you hold, with its Standard plan starting at £15.25 a month and a basic free plan for businesses with fewer than 250 contacts. It is a strong product for email. The thing to notice is how it charges: the bill follows the size of your list, and in a shop every new order adds to the list.

Go down your sheet and mark each pair that overlaps. Then keep the one that is closest to your orders, because that is the one that stays up to date without anyone typing.

Step 4: count the copies of your customer

Now read down the fourth column. Count how many apps hold a customer's email address. For many shops it is the shop platform, the newsletter tool, the inbox, a spreadsheet and the till.

Each copy is a place where the customer can be out of date. They change their address in one and not the others. They unsubscribe from the newsletter and still get the email you sent by hand. They tell one of you about an allergy and the note sits in an app the other person never opens.

It is also work when a customer asks what you hold on them. In the UK, the ICO's guide for small organisations says you have one calendar month to answer that kind of request, and tells you to keep looking until you are satisfied there is nowhere else to look. That search is quicker across two places than across six.

When separate apps are the right answer

Fewer is not always better. Keep a separate tool when:

It does one job far better than any combined tool would, and that job matters to your shop. Accounting software is the usual case.
Only one person uses it and it does not hold customer details.
It is free, it works, and replacing it would take a weekend you do not have.

If you finish the hour with three or four apps, each used every week, and you can still answer a customer's question without opening all of them, you are done. Put a note in the calendar to repeat the check in six months.

When to combine

Combining is worth the effort when the apps you have left all describe the same customer and none of them shows the whole picture. Typical signs: you copy a list from one tool to another before every newsletter, a colleague cannot see what you told a customer last week, or the monthly total goes up each time you take someone on.

When you compare combined tools, ask how each one charges as you grow (per person, per contact, or a flat price), whether orders arrive without typing, and whether you can export everything if you leave.

Where Workden fits

We built Workden to stand in for four of the rows on that sheet: the customer database, the email marketing tool, the shared task app and the automation tool. They work from the same customers, so there is one copy to keep right. Orders from Shopify or WooCommerce arrive on their own, on the page of the customer who placed them, and you can import the list you already keep.

It is £10.99 a month for your whole team, with no charge per person. It does not replace your online shop, your accounts package or your till, so those rows stay on your sheet. Till sales from Square are on the way and not there yet. There is no free plan. If your hour's check left you with several apps that each know part of the customer, the 14 day free trial is long enough to load your own list and see how many rows you could cross off.

Questions shop owners ask

How do I find every subscription my shop is paying for?

Read a year of bank and card statements, search your email for receipts and renewals, and ask your staff. Look at the bill from your shop platform too, in case any apps are charged through it.

Is one combined tool always cheaper than several apps?

No. If the free plans and built-in features of what you already have cover the work, that is cheaper. A combined tool pays for itself when it replaces two or more paid subscriptions, or saves the time spent copying between them.

What should I do before cancelling an app?

Export your customer list and any history you want to keep, check the renewal date, and make sure nothing else relies on it, such as a signup form on your website.

Sources

Checked 10 October 2026.