Nobody really likes paying subscriptions. Of course, the tools you pay for may justify spending your hard-earned money. But between the third and seventh recurring charge on your credit card statement, the math is no longer so friendly. And unfortunately, for the most part, the number of tools is only increasing. You start with one app for one task, you subscribe to another, and your friend just recommended another tool that made a marginal improvement to his workflow, so now you subscribe to that too.
Before long, you’re wasting $50, $80, maybe more than $100 a month on a patchwork of apps that each do one thing reasonably well. I’m on a mission to narrow down the tools I’ve subscribed to for a while now, and essentially narrow the list down to those that truly earn their place on my bank statement each month. Turns out Claude alone helped me cut four of them (and I’m sure this list will only grow).
My budgeting app
My most ironic subscription
Unfortunately, I have no self-control and feel like I’m always looking for a new way to spend money in some way. I realized many years ago that the only real way to reduce my spending was to either keep my bank account completely empty and lock my money away, or track where every dollar goes.
Since this realization, I’ve hopped between countless budgeting apps. While there are plenty of free apps you’ll find on the App Store and Google Play Store for this purpose, and you always have the option of using something like a Notion dashboard or a simple spreadsheet, the apps that actually do the job well enough to keep you coming back tend to be behind a paywall. Paying for these apps has always seemed like a particularly cruel irony: paying money just to be told you’re spending way too much money.
When Claude launched the Projects feature, I started a tiny experiment where I asked him to create a budget tracking spreadsheet, then used a dedicated project to record each transaction. The way I wanted the system to work was simple: I would simply message Claude the same way you would text a friend (“I spent $7 on matcha”, “I paid $1,000 in rent”, etc.). Claude would then categorize everything, ask me to clarify if in doubt, and automatically update the spreadsheet. This quickly grew from an idea I had to a full-fledged system that actually works, and I’ve been using it ever since.
I’ve always found traditional budgeting apps and managing spreadsheets to be a pain. There’s something about looking at rows of numbers and drop-down menus that blows my mind. In fact, I find it extremely frustrating just to open an app or spreadsheet and then have to click a bunch of buttons, select categories from drop-down lists, enter amounts in the appropriate fields, and make sure everything lines up. This friction alone is enough to make me avoid registering a purchase altogether. And once you skip one, you skip three, and then the whole system collapses.
With this Claude system that I developed, there is none of that. I just type what happened in plain English and the spreadsheet stays up to date without me touching it directly. Claude projects are available on the free tier, so you should be able to develop this system without even having a paid Claude subscription. I wrote an entire article detailing my experience and how I set it up, and I highly recommend you read it if you’re tired of spending on budgeting apps.
Canva, Adobe Express and Figma
Paying for templates, I’d spend 20 minutes tweaking them anyway
I’m not a designer or artist in any way and never had the patience to learn tools like Photoshop or Illustrator. This is exactly why I’ve always resorted to tools that are much easier to use, like Canva and Adobe Express. These apps have made design accessible enough that I can create a decent-looking social media post or presentation without needing any real skill or talent. Beyond editing features, Canva and Adobe Express offer tens of thousands of templates that make the entire design process even easier. You choose one that’s close enough to what you need, make a few adjustments here and there, and you’re done in minutes.
For the longest time, I really couldn’t imagine giving it up. Fast forward to today, and we’ve reached a point where AI tools can do much more than write emails and generate text for you. Claude is an excellent tool for these purposes.
For example, I came across a Claude skill developed by Zara Zhang called Frontend Slides, designed for generating HTML presentations. These presentations are generated using HTML, CSS and JavaScript, which means they are fully interactive and accompanied by smooth animations. You describe the type of terrace you want in simple English, Claude asks you about your aesthetic preferences, then builds it slide by slide. I’ve written about this skill in detail before, but the short version is this: It made me realize that I no longer needed Canva or Express for presentations.
Anthropic also added Claude Design a few days ago, and it positions itself as a Figma competitor. It allows you to describe what you need (a pitch deck, a poster, a social media post, etc.) and Claude generates a first, fully interactive version. You can then refine it through conversation, online comments, or even custom sliders it creates to let you change things like spacing and color in real time. I’ve been using this feature to generate a lot of social media posts since its launch, and I’m really impressed with it. It’s still in research preview and has its limitations, but for someone like me who was never going to open Figma anyway, it already does more than enough.
To recover
Plan my schedule around my scheduling app
One of the first AI tools I used that was designed for something other than the usual text generation, image creation, and search was Reclaim. If you’re not familiar with it, Reclaim is an AI-powered calendar planning tool that automatically blocks time for your habits, tasks, and meetings based on your priorities. The tool monitors your calendar, defends your focus time, and intelligently reshuffles things when conflicts arise. All you have to do is add the tasks you need to complete, and that’s it. It was one of the first tools that made me realize that AI could be truly useful beyond just answering questions.
I paid for Reclaim for a very long time, but somewhere along the way I realized that I was going to end up reworking a lot of the tasks that the tool was blocking me over time. Life was getting in the way, I would need to move things around, and before I knew it, I was spending more time managing the calendar Reclaim created than I would have spent simply planning my day myself. The other thing that started to bother me was the manual input. Every task I wanted Reclaim to schedule had to be added by hand. I would have to grab it, set priority, estimate duration and find the right slot. The very thing I was paying the tool to remove was still taking up my time, just in a different form.
What replaced it was honestly simpler than I expected. Claude connects to both my Google Calendar and Asana, where all my work tasks are assigned. So now, instead of manually adding tasks to a scheduling tool, I simply open Claude and tell him to check my Asana, collect what’s due this week, and block out time for that on my calendar. This setup is surely not as practical as Reclaim can be at its best. Claude will not proactively rearrange my day without me asking. In my case though, this feature wasn’t the most useful part of Reclaim anyway. So, Claude replaces Reclaim (and all AI-assisted calendar planning apps) for me.
These are just a few tools that Claude has made redundant
Claude has become my best AI tool in a very short time, and while it has helped me improve my productivity in ways I didn’t really imagine, I didn’t really think that a Claude subscription would end up replacing so many others. And yet here we are!