Tool Debt: The Real ROI of Your Tech Stack

It starts with a free trial. Thirty days, no commitment, just pop your card in. Then life happens, the trial ends, and the tool quietly bills you every month for something you opened twice.

May has a name for it: tool debt. In the latest episode of May Contain Jab: The Owner's Edge, she and Jab put the modern tech stack on trial.

How we got here

Jab traces it back to the shift from boxed software to subscriptions. You used to feel a big one-off payment. Now it's £11 here and £30 there, and nobody adds it up.

The result? Jab points to Okta's Businesses at Work report, which found the average organisation deployed 89 apps in 2023. His own stack, even after a cull, runs to hundreds a month. His honest admission: "I try not to look."

The price tag is the smallest cost

The monthly invoice is only part of the bill. May and Jab break down what a tool really costs:

• Setup time. Days on calls with support teams before it does anything useful.
• Training time. Energy pulled away from the work that makes you money.
• Your team's time. It's never just the founder learning the tool.
• Mind share. The hardest to measure and the most expensive. Every tool is one more thing to think about.

Jab puts numbers on it. A £50 a month tool that eats three hours of founder time a week can really cost around £600 a month once you price in your hourly rate.

Zombie subscriptions

Then there are the tools nobody uses at all. Paid for, logged into once, forgotten. May explains why they stick around: a tool that once had a job becomes part of the furniture, and removing it feels harder than keeping it.

Even the tools you do use are rarely used fully. You sign up for one feature and pay for fifteen.

When automation pays for itself

This is where May brings the finance lens. Her starting formula is simple:

Hours saved per week × effective hourly rate × weeks per year

She puts a typical single-function automation build at £500 to £2,000. Save 8 to 15 hours a week and the payback period can be four to six weeks.

But she's clear about the hidden costs too. There's an automation tax, the time spent maintaining workflows as your business changes. And there's automation debt: a 300-node workflow nobody understands will break, and nobody will know how to fix it.

Her rule for whether a process is ready: "As long as it's repeatable, it's automatable."

Simple often wins

One of the best moments comes from an unlikely place. Jab describes a senior tech leader who runs his day on a notepad. Five goals, a tick or a cross, done.

May built her own simple to-do tool in a couple of hours. She uses it every day. Jab's verdict: "ROI comes from adherence." The best tool is the one your team actually uses.

Your first step this week

Open your last bank statement. For every tool on it, ask when it last helped you make a decision or make money. Score each one for fit, how recently you used it, and how much friction it causes. Cut the lowest scorer.

Hear the full conversation

This is just the surface. In the full episode, May and Jab also cover:

• Zapier vs Make vs n8n, and which one May recommends for beginners
• What over-automation looks like, and why some friction is healthy
• Hot takes on Shopify, Canva Pro and whether AI agents will replace your marketing stack
• AI agents explained in plain English

Listen to the full episode of May Contain Jab: The Owner's Edge above, or wherever you get your podcasts.