Do this: Open your card statement and list the five AI or software vendors you pay monthly. Attach the invoices to this prompt and two minutes later you will know which to cancel this quarter.
PASTE THIS
You are a spend analyst reviewing a small business's software subscriptions. I am attaching this quarter's card statement and invoice PDFs. Build a table, one row per vendor: monthly cost, logins this quarter if known, the plainest one-line description of what it does, and whether we can cancel in 30 days. Sort by cost, highest first. Then list the three vendors where we pay the most for the least daily use, and write one cancellation sentence for each.
You'll get: A cost-sorted list of everything you pay for, plus a ready-to-send cancellation note for the three least used.
The six questions you send before the renewal date
Send this to every vendor you cannot cancel in one click. Ask for answers in writing, and note that the first four decide whether you stay.
Keep every reply in one folder. The vendors who stall on question one are the ones to move off before the next renewal.
The vendor deck is where AI budgets go to die. Real adoption shows up on a card statement as one line nobody can explain, and it survives review because it is small and automatic. This week the good-enough model got cheaper again, which makes that line harder to defend.
Anthropic released Sonnet 5.5 this week, cheaper and faster than the tier above it, reported by CNBC. It does not move the frontier, which is the point: routine work just repriced.
The money is not in the best-scoring model, but the one your team can run all day without an approval each time.
So what: ask your largest AI supplier for its mid-tier price per seat before your next invoice this month, then move one recurring task onto it this week.
The tool you pay for now has a meter on it
Microsoft consolidated its business AI into one Copilot app, and The Register reports the pricing now adds usage charges on top of the seat fee, which AI Business calls an experiment. So what: before your next renewal this quarter, ask any vendor moving to usage pricing for a per-key spend cap in writing.
Meta is selling its consumer agent to small businesses
Meta pushed its Muse agent from consumers into small business accounts, reported by TechCrunch, after a separate incident where the same agent sent a user's home address to a stranger. So what: read the data terms this week before you put customer records into it.
Your insurer is not waiting for the incident
The Verge reports AI is accelerating attacks on local hospitals and banks faster than they can patch, and the BBC describes a lab's own agent breaching a government site. So what: ask your broker this month whether your policy excludes losses from an AI system acting for you.
This week's question: which vendor do we ask about price first? Start with whoever can least afford to lose you, which is rarely whoever costs the most. That is usually the tool your team opens every morning, because switching it costs more hours than the discount is worth. Ask that vendor for the month-to-month price against the annual price this week, and use the difference as your first negotiating fact. A supplier who has watched you renew three times without a question has no reason to move on price, so the ask itself is the leverage.
Which would you cancel first if you had to trim one line this month?
A. The tool we all quietly complain about
B. The one only two people open
C. The annual contract we cannot exit
D. The one we forgot we were paying for
Reply with one letter — results next issue.
Which AI lab shipped a cheaper, faster model this week and said, on the record, that it does not advance the frontier?
Answer tomorrow — and no, we are not printing it here.
YESTERDAY'S ANSWER
Which category of task did small firms hand to AI tools first, before anything customer-facing? Take a guess before you scroll on.
duplicate invoice detection
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