I was paying for a grammar checker, a meeting note taker, and a writing assistant. Three separate subscriptions. Around forty bucks a month combined.
Last month I canceled all three.
Not because I stopped needing them. Because one AI app started doing all of it well enough that paying for three specialists stopped making sense. And I think this is about to happen to a lot of people.
How it happened
I started using a general-purpose AI tool — not as a replacement for anything specific, just as a thing I had open while working. Paste in an email, clean it up. Drop in meeting notes, get a summary. Need to rewrite something for a different audience, done in seconds.
At some point I realized I hadn't opened Grammarly in two weeks. Hadn't used Otter since January. The dedicated writing tool was just sitting there billing me.
The general-purpose AI wasn't better at any one of those things individually. Grammarly probably catches more grammar edge cases. Otter probably has better speaker identification. But "good enough at everything" beat "excellent at one thing" because I didn't want to context-switch between four different apps.
This is going to keep happening
The pattern is clear: specialized AI tools are getting eaten by general-purpose ones. Not because the general tools are superior — they're often not — but because people don't want twelve subscriptions for twelve narrow features.
The same thing happened with productivity apps a few years ago. Everyone had a separate tool for notes, tasks, docs, and wikis. Then Notion showed up and said "what if one app did all of that pretty well?" It wasn't the best at any single thing. But consolidation won.
AI tools are in that same phase right now. The winners won't be the ones with the best single feature. They'll be the ones that handle the most daily tasks without making you switch apps.
What I'd actually do
Audit your AI subscriptions. If you're paying for more than two, you're probably overlapping. Pick the one you use most, push it to do the jobs of the others, and see what happens. You might be surprised how much you can consolidate.
I kept one paid AI tool and my life is simpler. Forty bucks back in my pocket doesn't hurt either.