Marketing agency owners: how many software subscriptions does your agency pay for each month?

Marketing agency owners get asked this a lot, and our number is 11. Jordan James Media runs 11 paid software subscriptions each month across the full stack: ad platform billing, analytics, a site speed/crawl tool, a heatmap tool, an email sender, a project management tool, a design tool, a staging/hosting environment, a rank tracker, a call tracking tool and a password manager for client access.

The one we'd cut first is the heatmap tool. It duplicates data we already get from analytics event tracking and session recordings bundled into our CRO workflow, so the overlap shows up as two tools answering the same question: where do visitors drop off on a landing page. When we audited our own stack last quarter, that was the clearest case of paying twice for one insight. The rank tracker stays because it's the only tool giving us daily position data by postcode for local SEO clients, which nothing else in the stack replicates.

If you're running a small business and wondering whether your own marketing stack has the same duplication problem, the check is simple: list every tool, write one sentence next to each describing the single question it answers, and anything with the same answer as another tool is a candidate to cut. We run this audit on our own subscriptions roughly every six months because tools get added for one project and then nobody turns them off.

As a Sydney-based full-stack studio covering acquisition, build and the integrations that join them, we see this same subscription creep in client accounts too, paying for three tools that do one job because nobody owns the stack end to end. If you want someone to audit your marketing software stack alongside your SEO, Google Ads and website setup, get in touch with Jordan James Media.