The ones we actually use, and the ones we stopped paying for

Every few months someone shows us a list of “the 30 essential marketing tools.” Almost always, it’s a list of subscriptions. Here’s the opposite: the tools we really use at the agency, which ones cost money, which ones don’t, and why we stopped paying for the ones we dropped. No affiliate links and no pricing comparisons; just what we do every week.

The rule we filter by

Before signing up for or renewing any tool, we ask ourselves a single question: what decision changes if I turn it off? If the answer is “none,” we cancel it. If the answer is “we’d stop seeing something that makes us act,” it stays. With that filter, the final list is shorter than anyone would expect.

What we use every week

• Google Search Console. It’s free and it’s the only source that tells you which searches actually bring people to a site: impressions, clicks, position. We have it connected via API, with read-only permission, to the sites we manage. Every article we write starts from a query there, not from a hunch.
• The WordPress REST API. It comes built into WordPress. With it we read what’s published, create articles, upload images, and assign categories without opening the dashboard. For an agency with several sites, that automation is worth more than any paid plugin.
• The Meta API (Facebook and Instagram). Also free. It lets us publish and study what works for the competition, and it doesn’t require a middleman platform for every account.
• An image generator via API. For each article’s featured image we use GPT Image, paying per generated image rather than through a subscription. A medium-quality image costs a fraction of what a monthly stock photo license would, and you only pay when one is generated.
• An AI agent with a terminal. This is the piece that ties everything above together: it reads Search Console, writes, publishes, and gets the social copy ready. It’s not a marketing tool in the classic sense, but it’s the reason the others hardly need an interface.
• Zernio. We use it for LinkedIn and for WhatsApp messaging, where publishing or replying through a direct API is more complicated. It’s one of the few tools we pay for on a recurring basis, because it solves something we had no free way to solve.

What we stopped paying for

There are three categories of spending we cut, and all three follow the same pattern: we were paying for a pretty interface to get something we could pull straight from the source.

1. Chat subscriptions for generating images. We had a ChatGPT plan through a free month, and from day one the plan was not to renew it. Image generation stayed on the API, which is billed by usage and is a separate account: canceling the subscription doesn’t affect the API. You pay for what you generate, not for what you could generate.
2. Dashboards that repeat what Search Console already says. Many SEO dashboards show, in a different design, the same impressions and position data Google gives away for free. If the panel’s only value is drawing the chart, the chart can draw itself.
3. Social scheduling tools for every account. Paying a middleman platform for each social network gets expensive with several brands. Where the network’s official API allows it, we publish directly; we only use an intermediary where there’s no reasonable alternative.

What’s still worth paying for

To be fair to paid tools: not everything expensive is superfluous. A rank tracker or a keyword database does offer something Search Console doesn’t, which is seeing what hasn’t happened to you yet. Search Console only measures the searches you already appear in. If you want to know what demand exists where you’re not yet present, like searches for “web SEO agency in Cancún,” with hundreds of searches and almost no good results, you need an external volume source. That’s where paying makes sense, and it’s best to pay for it in short stretches, for a specific piece of research, rather than as a permanent fixed cost.

How to decide what to cut at your agency or business

1. List everything you pay for each month, with the renewal date. Something nobody remembered almost always turns up.
2. For each line, write down the last decision you made with it. If you can’t write one, it’s a candidate for cancellation.
3. Check whether the data comes from a free source. Search Console, Google Analytics, and the WordPress and Meta APIs cover more than you’d think.
4. Prefer pay-per-use over monthly billing when the tool is used in bursts. An API that charges per image or per query is cheaper than a subscription you use irregularly.
5. Review every quarter. A tool that helps today may stop helping when your way of working changes.
6. Cancel before renewing, not after. Set a calendar alarm three days before the annual charge.

A concrete example: from idea to the image on this article

So it doesn’t stay abstract: the article you’re reading came out of a Search Console query about what already shows up on the site, was written and published through the WordPress API, and its featured image was generated through the image API and uploaded to the media library with its title and alt text. We didn’t open a single paid middleman platform along the way. Every step leaves a file behind, so if something fails we know which step it was and repeat it without starting from scratch. That traceability is the real saving: not the license money, but the hours you don’t lose hunting for what was done and when.

The opposite mistake: automating everything

It’s worth saying, so we’re not selling smoke: cutting subscriptions is not a goal. A badly built automation costs more than a license. The time we spend building and reviewing the scripts is real, and it only pays off if you’ll use them for months. For a business that publishes once a month, the simplest paid tool is probably the right choice. The criterion isn’t “free versus paid,” it’s how often you use it and what changes when you turn it off.

If you’d like us to review your stack

If you pay for several marketing tools and don’t know which ones are actually serving you, we can do the review with you: a list of what you have, which decision each one feeds, and what can be replaced by a free source or by pay-per-use. Get in touch and we’ll tell you what we’d keep and what we’d cut.

Description of Graphemics’ operation as of October 2026. We don’t quote prices because they change frequently; check each provider’s page before deciding. Just because a tool works for us doesn’t guarantee it’s the right fit for another business.

Versión en español: Las que uso de verdad, y las que dejé de pagar