David Neira is an official Notion Ambassador and the founder of NotioStore, where he builds custom Notion operating systems for architecture, construction, and interior design firms. He run 40 Notion Setup Sessions per week and writes here about making Notion hold up under real client work.
Add up what you spend on software every month. Not just the big obvious ones, all of them: the project tool, the notes app, the CRM you barely open, the form builder, the wiki, the thing you signed up for once and forgot to cancel. For most entrepreneurs the number is far bigger than they’d guess, often a couple of hundred dollars a month, quietly leaving the account in $12 and $29 increments nobody’s tracking. It’s the bill you never actually look at, and it’s been growing the whole time.
Most of that stack exists because you added a tool every time you hit a need and never went back to check what was still worth paying for. The truth is that a lot of those tools do things one workspace can do just as well. Entrepreneurs can replace expensive tools with Notion by consolidating the overlapping ones, notes, docs, projects, wiki, simple CRM, into a single subscription, while keeping only the specialized tools that genuinely earn their price. Done right, it cuts the monthly bleed sharply without losing a single thing you actually relied on.
The first cost is the obvious one, made invisible by how it’s charged. A stack of tools at $12, $20, and $29 a month doesn’t feel like much individually, which is exactly why it grows unchecked, but totalled up it’s often two or three hundred dollars a month, several thousand a year. For a bootstrapped business, that’s not a rounding error; it’s runway, or a contractor you couldn’t afford, or the money that would’ve made this quarter work.
The second cost is redundancy. Half the tools in a typical stack overlap, a task feature here, a notes feature there, three different places that store documents, so you’re paying repeatedly for capabilities you could have once. You’re not buying five different things; you’re buying the same handful of things five times over, in five subscriptions.
The third cost multiplies as you grow, because most of these tools charge per seat. A modest stack that’s tolerable solo becomes brutal at five people, every new hire multiplying every subscription at once. What looked like a small monthly cost quietly scales into a serious one, right when cash is tightest.
It happens the same way for everyone: one tool at a time, each for a good reason. You needed to track projects, so you got a project tool. You needed a wiki, so you got a wiki. Every single subscription made sense on the day you added it, which is why nobody notices the stack becoming expensive, each piece was justified in isolation.
What almost never happens is the review. Nobody goes back to ask whether the notes tool and the docs tool and the wiki are really three different needs, or whether one flexible tool could cover all three. So the tools accumulate and stay, long after a single workspace could have replaced several of them, because adding is easy and consciously cutting is a thing you have to remember to do.
Notion changes the math because it’s flexible enough to be many tools at once. One workspace, on a single affordable subscription, handles notes, documents, tasks, projects, a wiki, and a simple CRM, the general-purpose jobs spread across half your stack. Consolidating them into one connected workspace collapses several subscriptions into one, and it’s the same move that also ends the scatter of your work living in a dozen disconnected places.
Start with project management. A Notion database with a board, a timeline, and task tracking, built on the databases at the heart of the tool, does what most small teams use a paid project tool for, so the dedicated subscription often becomes redundant.
Next, notes, documents, and your wiki, usually two or three separate subscriptions. Notion is genuinely strong at all of it: documents, meeting notes, and an organized internal knowledge base all live in one place, replacing the notes app, the docs tool, and the wiki in a single stroke.
A simple CRM is another common replacement. If you’re an early-stage business tracking leads and clients in a light way, a Notion database does that comfortably, so the entry-level CRM subscription you’re barely using can often go. Add basic forms, a simple content calendar, and light databases, and you’ve identified a meaningful share of a typical stack that one Notion subscription can absorb.
Here’s it working. A solo consultant was paying for a project tool, a notes app, an entry-level CRM, a form builder, and a wiki tool, around a hundred and eighty dollars a month without ever having tallied it. He moved the overlapping ones into Notion, projects, notes, wiki, and lead tracking all in one workspace, kept his accounting software and email, and cut his software bill to a fraction of what it had been. Same capability, one subscription, and the saving went straight back into the business.
Here’s the honest part that saves you from an expensive mistake: Notion does not replace everything, and cancelling a tool you actually need to save fifteen dollars will cost you far more than it saves. Some tools genuinely earn their price, and you should keep them.
Keep your accounting, invoicing, and payroll software. Notion can track money loosely, but it isn’t built for compliant bookkeeping, tax, or payroll, and those carry legal weight, so keep the proper tools for anything financial or statutory. Keep your email, too, Notion isn’t an email client and isn’t trying to be. Keep your design and creative tools, Figma, Adobe, Canva, because Notion is not a design tool and won’t pretend to be. And keep any specialist tool you genuinely rely on at depth, a real CRM running high-volume sales, a proper support desk, dedicated analytics, e-signatures, where the specialist does something Notion can’t, the specialist stays.
The move isn’t to replace everything; it’s to replace the overlapping, general-purpose tools while keeping the specialists that pull their weight. Two more honest notes: the saving only lands when you actually cancel the old tools, not when you rebuild in Notion and keep paying for both, and migrating your data across takes real effort, so budget a little time for the switch. Do it deliberately and you cut the waste without losing a single capability you depended on.
Don’t cancel anything yet. Do the one thing that reveals the whole opportunity: list every software subscription you pay for, with its monthly cost beside it, and add it up. The total alone is usually a small shock.
Then mark the general-purpose ones, notes, docs, tasks, projects, wiki, simple CRM, because that group is roughly what consolidating into Notion could save you every month. Seeing that number next to a single Notion subscription tends to settle the question on its own, and it turns a vague sense that you’re overpaying into an exact figure you can act on.
If you’d rather have someone map your stack, build the replacements in Notion, and tell you honestly which tools to keep, book a discovery call and we’ll work out what you can consolidate and what you shouldn’t.
A pile of tasks isn’t task management. Real task management is knowing, at any moment, what to do next, and that takes more than a list. This is a step-by-step tutorial for using Notion for task management.
Entrepreneurs can replace expensive tools with Notion by consolidating the overlapping ones, notes, docs, projects, wiki, simple CRM, into a single subscription, while keeping only the specialized tools that genuinely earn their price.
New to Notion? Discover the most common beginner mistakes and how to avoid them so you can build a smarter, simpler, and stress-free Notion system.
Built for the businesses that build everything else.
No product pitches. No padding. One weekly read for serious operators.