Developer Subscription Audit 2026: Cut $200+/Month in Tool Sprawl

Updated February 2026 • 12 min read

The Typical Developer SaaS Stack (and What It Costs)

🖥️ Code Editors & IDEs: $0-30/month

• JetBrains All Products: $24/month → VS Code (free) + extensions
• GitHub Copilot: $10/month → Keep if you use it daily, cut if occasional
• Cursor: $20/month → Replaces JetBrains + Copilot if you go all-in

Optimized cost: $0-20/month (one AI editor, skip the rest)

☁️ Hosting & Infrastructure: $5-200/month

• Heroku: $7-50/app → Railway ($5 credit free), Fly.io (free tier), Render
• Vercel Pro: $20/month → Free tier handles most projects; $20 only for commercial teams
• AWS/GCP: $10-500/month → Right-size instances, use spot/preemptible, set billing alerts
• DigitalOcean: $5-48/month → Hetzner is 50-70% cheaper for same specs

Optimized cost: $0-20/month for side projects, $50-100 for production apps

📊 Monitoring & Observability: $0-300/month

• Datadog: $15-34/host/month → Grafana Cloud (free 10K metrics), Prometheus (free)
• New Relic: $25/user/month → Free tier covers 100GB/month
• Sentry: $26/month → Free tier covers 5K events/month — plenty for most apps
• LogRocket: $99/month → PostHog (free 1M events/month)

Optimized cost: $0 (free tiers cover indie and small team needs)

🗄️ Databases: $0-100/month

• MongoDB Atlas: $57-340/month → Supabase (free Postgres), PlanetScale (free 5GB)
• Firebase Blaze: $0-500/month → Set budget alerts! Runaway reads can cost hundreds
• Redis Labs: $5-60/month → Upstash (free tier), Railway ($5 credit)

Optimized cost: $0-7/month

🔧 API Tools & Testing: $0-50/month

• Postman Pro: $14-29/user/month → Bruno (free, open-source), VS Code REST Client
• Ngrok Pro: $8/month → Cloudflare Tunnel (free), localtunnel (free)
• Algolia: $35/month → Meilisearch (free, self-hosted), Typesense (free)

Optimized cost: $0

🎨 Design & Collaboration: $0-30/month

• Figma Pro: $15/editor/month → Free tier (3 projects) is plenty for devs
• Linear: $8/user/month → GitHub Issues (free), Plane.so (free, open-source)
• Notion: $10/month → Free tier for personal use, Obsidian (free)
• Slack Pro: $8.75/user/month → Discord (free), Zulip (free, open-source)

Optimized cost: $0-15/month

🌐 Domains & DNS: $10-50/month

• Domain registrations: $10-15/year each → Audit: do you actually use all your domains?
• Cloudflare Pro: $20/month → Free tier includes CDN, DDoS protection, DNS
• Email hosting: $6/user/month → ImprovMX (free forwarding) for side projects

Optimized cost: $1-5/month (keep essential domains only)

The Optimized Dev Stack (2026)

Audit Steps

1. Pull your bank statement — search for every SaaS charge in the last 3 months
2. List every tool with monthly cost, last active use, and free alternative
3. Cut unused tools immediately — if you haven't used it in 30 days, cancel it
4. Consolidate overlapping tools — one editor, one hosting platform, one monitoring stack
5. Set calendar reminders for annual renewal dates

Related Cancel Guides

• Cancel JetBrains — fallback license + free alternatives
• Cancel Heroku — free hosting alternatives
• Cancel MongoDB Atlas — database migration guide
• Cancel Postman — open-source API tools
• Cancel GitHub Copilot — AI code assistant alternatives