Your SaaS bill is a part-time hire
A receipts-first guide to cutting recurring software costs — without sacrificing what your business actually needs. Same playbook one solopreneur used to go from $500-$600/month to $95.
What's inside
- The 15-minute audit that uncovers the 40-60% of your monthly SaaS bill you are paying but not actually using — plus the cost-per-hour-saved column nobody fills in
- The four-factor decision framework that tells you exactly which subscriptions to replace, which to keep, and which to automate around — with the full Total Cost of Ownership formula that counts maintenance and opportunity cost, not just the subscription fee
- The 90-day action plan, customized for the three reader profiles — the technical solopreneur on a VPS, the non-technical creator without a GPU, and the small team paying per seat for everything
Frequently asked questions
Is this an anti-SaaS manifesto?
No. Two of the ten chapters in this book — email marketing and payment processing — get an entire chapter on why you should keep paying. The book is the framework for telling apart the line items that earn their seat from the ones that do not. The principle is intentionality, not abstinence.
Do I need to be technical to read this book?
No. Profile B (non-technical creator without a GPU) is one of the three reader profiles the 90-day plan is customized for. The plan for that profile uses platform switches and cloud APIs — never opens a terminal you do not like — and still cuts your bill by 60-70%. There's a chapter on using Claude Code (or any coding assistant) as your engineering co-pilot for the installs in the book, which means the "8 hours of setup" estimates collapse to 20-30 minutes on most installs.
What do I actually save?
It depends on your starting stack and which version of the plan you run. Realistic 90-day ranges:
- Profile A (technical solopreneur, VPS-comfortable): ~$3,360/year, 60 hours of work
- Profile B (non-technical creator): ~$2,280/year, 10 hours of work
- Profile C (small team of 4): ~$6,180/year, time spread across the team
Pat's own audit went from $500-$600/month to $95/month — about $4,860-$6,060/year in cash savings, plus 20-40 hours per week of time given back from the tools he no longer logs into.
What about hardware costs?
The book covers both paths. If you already have a VPS or a GPU (gaming, ML, video editing), local self-hosting is essentially free. If you do not, every replacement in the book has a cloud-API fallback at $0.02-$0.05 per use that is still cheaper than the SaaS you are replacing. You do not have to buy a $2,500 GPU to read this book.
Is this book about AI agents?
It is one chapter of the book, not the whole book. The agents are tools in the replacement playbook — a content writer agent that replaces Jasper, a support triage agent that replaces Zendesk — but the framework is older and broader than AI. The companion book that goes deep on building the agents themselves is The Agent Army (book 1 in The Sovereign Entrepreneur series).
Will the tools and prices in the book be out of date?
Some of them, yes. Vendors change pricing and feature tiers constantly; this is part of why the book exists. The framework (Chapter 2) and the decision filter are designed to outlast any specific tool reference. The pricing tables are honest as of early 2026 and the book labels them as such. Five years from now the SaaS landscape will look different. The frameworks will not.
Primary CTA
Buy on Amazon
Kindle Unlimited members read free for the first 90 days. Paperback ships from Amazon directly.
Bonus pack — free with email opt-in
The book references a bonus pack throughout. It contains:
saas-audit-spreadsheet.csv— the 15-minute audit template, pre-populated with 32 of the most common solopreneur subscriptionsreplace-vs-keep-filter.md— the four-factor decision worksheet plus the full TCO formulamonthly-savings-tracker.csv— one row per replaced subscription, with the 3/6/12-month honesty columnsself-hosting-quickstart-checklist.md— the pre-cancellation checklist generalized into a one-page templatepat-actual-saas-audit.md— Pat's real before-and-after audit, with redactions60-day-cut-your-saas-bill-in-half-plan.md— the accelerated version of the 90-day plan
Get the bonus pack — email me the files
Also in the series
The SaaS Purge is part of The Sovereign Entrepreneur — an entrepreneur's library for building a business where you own the machinery instead of renting it. Each book stands alone; together they are a curriculum.
Vol 1 — Build the Machine
- The Agent Army — how to build the 20 AI employees you couldn't afford to hire
- The Agent Operator's Manual — instruction-writing that makes agents reliable across any tool
- Zero-Token Enterprise — scale AI beyond a hobby without the API bill
- The AI Delegation Framework — manage, audit, and scale your agent army
- The Sovereign AI Stack — match your AI setup to your actual usage
- The SaaS Purge — you are here
- The Social Proof Moat — how to get chosen when buyers use AI to shop
- Digital Real Estate — own the internet property nobody can take from you
- The Build Phase — what actually compounds (and why "passive income" doesn't)
Free bonus: From Zero to Sovereign — a quickstart PDF for new entrepreneurs