The pitch going around is that you can cancel most of your software and rebuild it yourself for a fraction of the cost. The people making that pitch draw one line themselves, and it runs straight through the system your entire business sits on.
The suggestion is blunt: pull out your credit card bill, sit down with your favorite LLM, list every piece of software you pay for on a recurring basis, and ask which ones to cancel or rebuild and save money on. He says most agents find they are paying for ten, eleven or twelve pieces of software.
The other side gets stated fairly. Proptech companies that believe in their product argue theirs is fully built and getting better, so if you want the best you stay. The counter is that if you can build something that is 90 percent as good and take almost all of that cost off your P&L, you probably should look at it — which is why subscription software companies are described as vulnerable right now.
Then comes the caveat that keeps this from being a bad idea: "if you're a smaller team and your CRM has looked like Google Sheets, you probably can do better than that." And the opposite case — an agent doing heavy online lead generation whose team is built around Follow Up Boss is probably not getting away from it.
So the rule that falls out is not cancel everything. It is that the tools your daily workflow runs through stay, and the ones you barely use are the ones to question.
“if you're a smaller team and your CRM has looked like Google Sheets, you probably can do better than that”
The money is real. Ten subscriptions at forty dollars is most of a listing's marketing budget spent on tools you opened twice. But the tempting version of this — rebuilding your database — is the one that costs you a year if it breaks, and nobody notices a broken CRM until the follow-up that should have happened did not.
Audit from the outside in. Cancel the design tool, the second scheduler, the analytics dashboard nobody opens. Leave the system that holds your contacts and your transactions alone until something is genuinely better, not merely cheaper.