The longer I use Claude, the more I realize how many of my app subscriptions were covering problems it already handles. I use Claude every single day now - research, brainstorming, building things, processing information - and somewhere in that daily use I just stopped reaching for my other tools as much. Not because they're bad products necessarily, but because Claude was already doing the job and I was paying for overlapping use cases. There are also genuinely good free alternatives for most of what I was paying for, which makes the math even harder to justify.

Grammarly isn't necessary when you already use a chatbot

Claude reasons through your text instead of just flagging it

Grammarly Pro sits at $12/month on the annual plan - $144 upfront, every year, for writing assistance. The paid tier unlocks full-sentence rewrites, tone suggestions, and a monthly AI prompt cap on top of the grammar and spelling the free version already handles. I still have the free Chrome extension and it catches the obvious stuff, which is genuinely all I need from it most days.

The problem is that Grammarly can't actually read what I'm trying to say. It catches errors in isolation - it doesn't know the topic, the tone I'm going for, or that some of my mistakes are intentional (such as characters saying "gonna" instead of "going to" in my story). Claude does. I can paste in my text, tell it what the text is about, and what I need it to check for, and it gives me a response with all of that context in mind.

The really cool thing: Claude can build you an inline editor right in the chat, so you don't have to hop between your editor and the chat. I just make my improvements right inside Claude, then save it to the plain text file.

Notion was a workspace I was maintaining instead of using

It lost to a free app and a chatbot

Admittedly, I stopped using Notion before I started using Claude, so this is not quite one where Claude "made me cancel the subscription". AFFiNE has long replaced my Notion setup by now. However, I don't find myself reaching for my PKM stack as much at all since I've been using Claude.

Notion's free plan is actually fine for solo use to an extent (if you keep the setup simple). But if you want the AI features, the ones that are supposed to make it smarter and more useful as a workspace, that's $20/month. Which is a lot to ask for features that, in my experience, never quite delivered what they promised anyway. The AI knows your workspace in theory. In practice it felt like it was skimming it.

Claude replaced the actual function Notion was supposed to serve better than Notion did. Projects gives me persistent context that genuinely carries across conversations - it knows my work, remembers what I've told it, and connects things without me having to structure it first. And if I want to build something more tailored, persistent Artifacts does that, like a note interface, a task tracker, whatever I actually need rather than a generic template I'm adapting.

The filesystem connector is probably the biggest one though. Claude can create and edit text files directly on my machine mid-conversation, which means information just lives where it's always lived rather than inside a proprietary workspace I have to keep open and up to date…and pay for. Cowork is the other piece of the puzzle: it takes care of all of the file organization on an automated scheduled.

I seriously had no reason to ever pay for Readwise

Claude can handle most of what I used Readwise for

Readwise is $10 a month on the annual plan - Reader app included, highlight syncing, the spaced repetition email, all of it bundled. The pitch is that it resurfaces what you've read so you actually retain it, but in practice I'm not a heavy highlighter, and the daily digest became something I'd swipe away without reading anyway. When something's worth actually understanding, I drop the URL or paste the text into Claude and get a proper breakdown. I can ask for whatever format makes sense for that specific thing.

That's the straightforward way, at least. Readwise's actual value proposition is deeper than that - there's the Kindle syncing, a browser extension pulling highlights from articles, and all of it funnels into a spaced repetition system that resurfaces things weeks later. I just didn't really need any of that, so most of what I was paying for was infrastructure for a reading habit I don't have. Projects already lets me keep a running reading context across sessions, and I can actually just ask Claude to throw the text back at me within a text block with highlights, and keep that conversation pinned. Perhaps I'll make a return to Readwise one day, but for now, it's just not worth the subscription.

Three subscriptions down

Yes, I am paying for Claude Pro now, so it's not like I'm getting all of its capabilities for free either, but it's still less than half of all of these combined. And it's actually currently the only tool I'm paying for in the AI and productivity space. Some of these tools I actually liked, at least at one point, and they're not bad by any means - this is more of a demonstration of how far Claude Desktop's use cases extend for productivity.