Do this: Open the card your business pays software from and copy the last three months of recurring charges. Paste them into a free AI tool with the prompt below. Two minutes later you have a ranked cut list.
PASTE THIS
You are a cost auditor for a small business. Below are three months of recurring software charges from our company card. For each vendor: 1) estimate what a team of under 20 people should pay, 2) flag duplicates, add-ons, and renewals nobody noticed, 3) rank the ten to cancel first, 4) write the cancellation email for the top three. Ask me one question about any charge you cannot classify. Here are the charges:
You'll get: A ranked cut list and three ready-to-send cancellation emails, sorted by what each one costs you per month. Owners start this with a vague feeling about waste and finish it with a number they can act on.
The renewal calendar that lives outside the vendor's app
The mistake is keeping renewal dates inside the tool that sends the invoice, because that tool has no reason to remind you.
Do this for your ten largest subscriptions before the next renewal lands, and the negotiation writes itself. Vendors sign a 12-month hold far more often than owners expect, because the hold costs them nothing today.
Shelfware survives every budget review because it is small and automatic. The tool nobody logs into is not a technology problem. It is a line on a card statement with no owner, and it costs more every year. This desk's test: if a charge has renewed twice and you cannot name who uses it, cancel it this week.
Nvidia's DGX Spark, the desktop box that runs AI models locally, now starts at $4,999 with half the memory it launched with, and the 128 GB version sits at $6,950, nearly 75% above its launch price, The Register reports. A 2 GB Raspberry Pi 4 that cost $35 now lists at $67.50, the same outlet notes.
So what: get any hardware quote in writing this week and place the order, or rent the same capacity monthly until prices settle.
Cloud is about to be regulated like a gatekeeper
Sources say an EU investigation will find that Azure and AWS meet the DMA's thresholds, Techmeme relays, days after Axios reported that AI is heading into an existential legal crisis of its own, per Axios. So what: ask each cloud vendor in writing what it costs to move your data out, before your next renewal.
The chip money machine is being syndicated
Broadcom's Wall Street syndicate is gathering $60 billion of fresh AI-chip financing, Techmeme relays, days after the Bank of England warned the AI boom could trigger market shocks, the BBC reports. Interpol adds that AI is already making attacks faster and harder to detect, per CNBC. So what: add both a repricing cap and a clause naming who pays when the vendor's agent causes a breach, before your next renewal.
A judge threw out the suits over Google's AI answers
A judge dismissed the antitrust suits over AI Overviews brought by Chegg and Penske, The Verge reports, which leaves the economics of free AI answers untouched, as TechCrunch argues. So what: stop waiting for a court to fix how AI answers treat your content, and ask your search vendor for your referral numbers this month.
This week's question: our AI note-taker renews in November, but only nine people have ever opened it. Do we cancel it? Cancel the unused seats this week, not the whole tool. A note-taker that nine people genuinely use is cheaper than a meeting nobody documents, and the vendor will almost certainly reprice rather than lose the line. Ask for the per-seat price at nine seats and the notice deadline, in writing. If both numbers do not arrive within a day, that is the answer, and you cancel before the notice window closes.
When did you last check what your software actually costs per month?
A. This month
B. Sometime this year
C. Only when something breaks
D. Never
Reply with one letter — results next issue.
One European country registered 44,000 new web domains in September, up from about 2,000 in August. What set that off?
Answer tomorrow — and no, we are not printing it here.
YESTERDAY'S ANSWER
Which chip designer agreed to lend Anthropic up to $42 billion to lease its chips?
Broadcom. Techmeme relays the filing: the loan runs through convertible notes and helps finance a $125.2B, five-year TPU lease commitment, which is the shape of nearly every large AI deal this year.
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