The SaaS Graveyard: 50 Tools AI Killed in 2025 (And What Replaced Them)
As a simulation/theory, this letter will walk through a SaaS or Business cancelling $4,127/month in software subscriptions that were likely needed or at least useful in the past—that now, are no longer needed because of better AI tools.
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Last August, I wrote that generative AI would bring software to $0: Will Generative AI Bring Software to $0?. The thesis was simple: when AI can do the work, why pay for the tool?
Twelve months later, I have simulation results & personal receipts lending way more credence to the position than I thought possible in that amount of time.
Here’s the full autopsy—organized by category, with exactly what I replaced each tool with. Some of these will be obvious. Others might surprise you. And at the end, I’ll tell you what didn’t die, because that’s where the real alpha is.
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The Design Stack Massacre
Previous spend: $847/month
Current spend: $60/month
The design category got hit hardest because image generation was the first AI capability that actually worked. Every tool that sat between “I have an idea” and “I have an image” is now fighting for survival.
1. Canva Pro — $119/year → DEAD
Cause of death: Midjourney + Figma free tier
Canva was the great democratizer. Non-designers could make passable graphics without learning Photoshop. But “passable” is now table stakes. Midjourney outputs images that make Canva templates look like clip art.
I use Midjourney for any image that needs to look custom, and Figma’s free tier for anything that needs precise layout. Total cost: the Midjourney subscription I was already paying for.
What Canva should have done: Gone all-in on AI image generation two years earlier. They eventually added it, but by then the habit was broken.
2. Adobe Creative Cloud — $599/year → DEAD
Cause of death: Midjourney + Photopea + Runway
This one hurt. I’d been an Adobe subscriber since the boxed software days. But I opened Photoshop maybe three times last year, and every time I thought “Claude could probably write me a script to do this.”
Midjourney handles generation. Photopea (free, browser-based Photoshop clone) handles the rare edit. Runway handles video. The Adobe suite is still the professional standard—but almost not worth the price even in professional startup settings. I was paying professional prices for amateur usage.
3. Shutterstock — $29/month → DEAD
Cause of death: Midjourney + DALL-E
Stock photography is cooked. Why pay $29/month to search through millions of generic images when you can generate exactly what you need?
The only stock photos I use now are for “real people in real situations” where AI still struggles with hands and authenticity. For that, I use Unsplash (free) on the rare occasion I need it.
4. Remove.bg — $9/month → DEAD
Cause of death: Native AI in every tool
Background removal used to be a feature worth paying for. Now it’s built into everything. Apple Photos does it. Figma does it. Even Microsoft Paint does it. The feature got commoditized into oblivion.
5. Loom — $15/month → DEAD
Cause of death: Screen Studio + AI voiceover
Loom was sticky because it was easy. Record, share, done. But Screen Studio ($89 one-time) does the same thing with better output, and users can add AI voiceover for anything that doesn’t need their face.
For internal videos, I just use OBS on Linux for the most part. Turns out most Loom videos didn’t need to exist in the first place.
6. Descript — $24/month → DEAD
Cause of death: Whisper + Claude + CapCut
Descript’s magic was transcription-based video editing. Edit the text, edit the video. Brilliant concept.
But Whisper (free, open source) does transcription. Claude cleans up the transcript. CapCut (free) handles the edit. The workflow takes slightly longer, but I was already using these tools for other things.
7. Noun Project — $40/year → DEAD
Cause of death: AI-generated icons + Lucide
Icon libraries were a designer’s secret weapon. Now I describe the icon I want to Claude, it generates an SVG, done. For standard UI icons, Lucide (free, open source) covers 99% of cases.
8. Envato Elements — $198/year → DEAD
Cause of death: AI generation + free alternatives
Envato was the everything store—templates, graphics, audio, video. The bundle made sense when creation was hard. Now creation is a prompt away. I generate what I need or find it in the increasingly robust free tier of the internet.
Design Stack Summary:
- Before: $847/month ($10,164/year)
- After: $60/month ($720/year) — just Midjourney
- Savings: $9,444/year
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The Writing Stack Funeral
Previous spend: $487/month
Current spend: $20/month
Every writing tool that promised to “help you write better” is now competing with models that write better than most humans. This was always going to be a bloodbath.
9. Grammarly Premium — $144/year → DEAD
Cause of death: Claude
Grammarly was the gateway drug to AI writing assistance. Red underlines for errors, suggestions for clarity. Revolutionary in 2015.
In 2025, I paste text into Claude and say “edit this for clarity and fix any errors.” It doesn’t just fix grammar—it improves the actual writing. Grammarly’s AI features tried to catch up, but they’re still playing the “suggestions” game while Claude just rewrites the damn thing.
10. Jasper — $49/month → DEAD
Cause of death: Claude
Jasper was the first AI writing tool I paid for. “AI copywriting” sounded like magic in 2022.
Then I realized Jasper was basically a GPT wrapper with templates. The templates were useful when prompting was hard. Now I know how to prompt. Why pay $49/month for someone else’s prompts?
11. Copy.ai — $36/month → DEAD
Cause of death: Claude
Same story as Jasper. The “AI copywriting” category was a transitional phase between “AI doesn’t exist” and “AI is a commodity.” We’re firmly in the commodity phase now.
12. Writesonic — $19/month → DEAD
Cause of death: Claude
I’m going to stop explaining these individually. Every tool in the “AI writing assistant” category died for the same reason: they were all reselling API access with a UI. The UI isn’t worth $19/month when the API costs $20/month and does everything.
13. Hemingway Editor — $20 one-time → DEAD
Cause of death: Claude
Hemingway was a beautiful simple tool. Paste text, see what’s hard to read, simplify. But Claude does this automatically. “Make this punchy and readable” is a better Hemingway than Hemingway.
14. ProWritingAid — $79/year → DEAD
Cause of death: Claude
ProWritingAid was Grammarly for serious writers—deeper analysis, style suggestions, pacing tools. All things Claude does better, in context, without a separate tool.
15. Wordtune — $9.99/month → DEAD
Cause of death: Claude
“Rewrite this sentence” is literally what LLMs are best at.
16. Rytr — $9/month → DEAD
Cause of death: Claude
Another wrapper. Another funeral.
17. Simplified — $18/month → DEAD
Cause of death: Claude + Midjourney
Simplified tried to be “everything for content creators”—writing, design, video. The all-in-one bundle made sense until each individual piece got disrupted by better AI.
18. Surfer SEO — $89/month → DEAD
Cause of death: Claude + Ahrefs free tools + common sense
Here’s my confession: most SEO tools are selling you complexity you don’t need.
Surfer would analyze top-ranking pages and tell you to include certain keywords at certain frequencies. “Use ‘best AI tools’ 7-12 times.” This was always pseudo-science dressed up as data.
Now I ask Claude: “What questions would someone searching for X want answered?” Then I answer those questions. This works better than keyword density optimization ever did.
I still use Ahrefs’ free tools for keyword research, but the $89/month “content optimization” tools were snake oil I was happy to stop buying.
19. MarketMuse — $149/month → DEAD
Cause of death: Claude
Same as Surfer. “AI-powered content strategy” sounded impressive. Then actual AI arrived and made the “AI-powered” tools look like calculators.
20. Clearscope — $170/month → DEAD
Cause of death: Claude
If you’re sensing a pattern, you’re paying attention.
Writing Stack Summary:
- Before: $487/month ($5,844/year)
- After: $20/month ($240/year) — just Claude Pro
- Savings: $5,604/year
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The Customer Support Cremation
Previous spend: $412/month
Current spend: $97/month
Support tools are dying slower because they’re embedded in workflows and have network effects. But the writing is on the wall—or more accurately, the chatbot is on the website.
21. Intercom — $189/month → DEAD
Cause of death: Crisp + custom AI chatbot
Intercom was best-in-class for years. The live chat was smooth, the help center was clean, the automations were powerful.
But $189/month is absurd when 80% of support queries can be handled by an AI that’s read your documentation. I moved to Crisp ($25/month for the tier I need) and built a custom GPT trained on our help docs. It answers faster than a human and never needs a lunch break.
The 20% of queries that need a human still get one. The other 80% get instant resolution. Support satisfaction actually went up.
22. Zendesk — $69/month → DEAD
Cause of death: Crisp + custom AI chatbot
Same migration as Intercom. Zendesk’s moat was integrations and enterprise features I never used.
23. Drift — $99/month → DEAD
Cause of death: Custom chatbot
Drift was “conversational marketing”—chatbots for lead qualification. The chatbots were rigid decision trees. Actual AI chatbots are better at conversations than Drift ever was.
24. Help Scout — $55/month → DEAD
Cause of death: Crisp
Help Scout was the “friendly” help desk—less enterprise, more human. Crisp does the same thing at a third of the price, with better AI features built in.
25. Tidio — $29/month → DEAD
Cause of death: Crisp + custom AI
The help desk consolidation was brutal. I tested Crisp, Freshdesk, and a few others. Crisp won on price/feature ratio. Everything else got cancelled.
26. Chatfuel — $15/month → DEAD
Cause of death: Custom GPT
Chatfuel was for building Facebook Messenger bots with a visual interface. The visual interface was the product—making bot-building accessible. Now Claude can write me a better bot in five minutes than I could build in Chatfuel in five hours.
27. ManyChat — $15/month → DEAD
Cause of death: Custom automations
Same story. The “no-code chatbot builder” category existed because code was hard. Code isn’t hard anymore.
Support Stack Summary:
- Before: $412/month ($4,944/year)
- After: $97/month ($1,164/year) — Crisp + API costs
- Savings: $3,780/year
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The Analytics and Data Autopsy
Previous spend: $628/month
Current spend: $149/month
Data tools are interesting because they span a spectrum from “completely dead” to “more essential than ever.” The difference is whether the tool does analysis or enables analysis.
28. Tableau — $70/month → DEAD
Cause of death: ChatGPT Code Interpreter + Claude
I kept Tableau around for “serious” data visualization. Then I realized I was using it maybe twice a month, always for the same thing: turn this CSV into a chart I can show someone.
Code Interpreter does this instantly. Upload CSV, describe the chart, done. For anything more complex, Claude writes me a Python script I can run locally.
Tableau is still the right choice for enterprise data teams. It was never the right choice for someone who needed charts occasionally.
29. Looker — $300/month → DEAD
Cause of death: Direct database queries + Claude
Looker was powerful—too powerful for what I needed. I was paying for a commercial jet when I needed a bicycle.
Now I query databases directly and have Claude help with SQL when I need it. This only works because I’m technical enough to be dangerous. If you’re non-technical, Looker might still make sense. For me, it was $300/month of overkill.
30. Mixpanel — $89/month → DEAD
Cause of death: PostHog (free tier) + simple analytics
Mixpanel was product analytics—funnels, retention, user paths. Important stuff.
But PostHog offers a generous free tier that covers most use cases. And honestly, I was drowning in data I never acted on. Fewer dashboards, more intuition turned out to be the right trade.
31. Amplitude — $0 (free) → Still DEAD in spirit
I was on Amplitude’s free tier, but I’m including it because I stopped using it. The marginal value of “more analytics data” hit zero. I know who my users are and what they do. More charts weren’t helping.
32. Hotjar — $39/month → DEAD
Cause of death: Microsoft Clarity (free)
Hotjar’s heatmaps and session recordings were genuinely useful. Then Microsoft released Clarity, which does the same thing for free. Literally free. Not freemium. Free.
This wasn’t an AI kill—it was a “free alternative exists” kill. But dead is dead.
33. Crazy Egg — $29/month → DEAD
Cause of death: Microsoft Clarity
Same as Hotjar. The heatmap market got commoditized into oblivion.
34. FullStory — $99/month → DEAD
Cause of death: PostHog + Clarity
FullStory was premium session recordings with powerful search. PostHog does this in their free tier now. The premium features weren’t worth the premium price.
35. Segment — $120/month → DEAD
Cause of death: Simple architecture + direct integrations
Segment was the “data plumbing” that connected everything to everything. Useful if you have a complex data stack. I simplified my data stack instead.
Direct API integrations + Claude to help write them when needed. Less elegant, but $120/month less expensive.
36. Heap — $0 (free) → Stopped using
Heap’s “auto-capture everything” approach sounded great until I had terabytes of data I didn’t need. Same story as Amplitude. More data stopped being useful.
Analytics Stack Summary:
- Before: $628/month ($7,536/year)
- After: $149/month ($1,788/year) — PostHog paid tier
- Savings: $5,748/year
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The Development Tools Graveyard
Previous spend: $267/month
Current spend: $40/month
Dev tools are dying differently than other categories. They’re not being replaced by AI—they’re being absorbed into AI. The IDE is becoming the tool, and everything else is becoming a prompt.
37. GitHub Copilot — $19/month → MIGRATED
Cause of death (sort of): Cursor
Copilot isn’t dead, but I stopped paying for it. Cursor ($20/month) is an entire IDE with AI built in, not an AI plugged into an IDE. The difference is substantial.
Copilot suggests code. Cursor writes code, refactors code, explains code, and does it in context of your entire codebase. This is a migration, not a death, but the billing change was real.
38. Tabnine — $12/month → DEAD
Cause of death: Cursor
Tabnine was “Copilot but you can run it locally.” Valid pitch in the privacy-conscious era. But Cursor is better enough that I stopped caring about local execution.
39. CodeClimate — $49/month → DEAD
Cause of death: AI code review
CodeClimate analyzed code quality—complexity, duplication, test coverage. Useful metrics.
Now I ask Claude to review my code. It doesn’t just measure complexity—it explains why something is complex and suggests how to simplify it. The qualitative feedback is more valuable than the quantitative metrics ever were.
40. SonarQube — $0 (free) → Stopped using
Same as CodeClimate. The static analysis tools measured things. AI explains things. Explanations are more actionable than measurements.
41. Snyk — $52/month → DEAD (for my scale)
Cause of death: GitHub’s free security features + Claude
Snyk scanned for vulnerabilities. Important. But GitHub does basic vulnerability scanning for free now, and Claude can analyze dependencies when I’m concerned about something specific.
At enterprise scale, Snyk probably still makes sense. At my scale, it was insurance I didn’t need.
42. Postman — $12/month → DEAD
Cause of death: Thunder Client + cURL + Claude
Postman was how you tested APIs. Beautiful UI, collections, environments. But Thunder Client (free VS Code extension) does 90% of what I used Postman for, and Claude can generate cURL commands for anything complex.
The $12/month was for team collaboration features I wasn’t using.
43. Readme.io — $99/month → DEAD
Cause of death: Mintlify ($0-99) + AI-generated docs
API documentation is now a commodity. Mintlify has a generous free tier. More importantly, Claude can generate documentation from code that’s better than what I would have written manually.
The days of paying $99/month for a documentation host are over.
44. GitBook — $19/month → DEAD
Cause of death: Mintlify + Notion
GitBook was clean documentation hosting. Notion is free for this use case and more flexible. Mintlify is better for technical docs specifically.
45. Linear — $0 → SURVIVED (barely)
Not dead: Linear is the one project management tool I kept. The design is phenomenal, the keyboard shortcuts are addictive, and the AI features are actually useful.
But I’m watching this one. If Cursor adds project management features—or if someone builds “Linear but AI-native”—Linear is at risk.
Dev Tools Summary:
- Before: $267/month ($3,204/year)
- After: $40/month ($480/year) — Cursor + Mintlify
- Savings: $2,724/year
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The Admin and Productivity Purge
Previous spend: $186/month
Current spend: $15/month
The “productivity tool” category was always suspect. Half of them existed to solve problems created by the other half. AI simplified the entire stack by eliminating the need for most of it.
46. Calendly — $12/month → DEAD
Cause of death: Cal.com (free) + AI scheduling
Calendly is a scheduling link. That’s it. Cal.com does the same thing, open source, free hosted tier.
For anything complex, I describe what I need to Claude and it drafts the email. “Find a time that works for both of us” is a solved problem that doesn’t need a $12/month subscription.
47. Otter.ai — $16.99/month → DEAD
Cause of death: Built-in transcription everywhere
Otter was automatic meeting transcription. Now Zoom, Google Meet, and Teams all have built-in transcription. macOS has built-in transcription. Whisper is free and runs locally.
The standalone transcription tool got absorbed into everything else.
48. Zapier — $49/month → DEAD (for most use cases)
Cause of death: n8n (self-hosted) + Claude for scripts
Zapier was the glue between apps. If X happens, do Y. Powerful and expensive.
n8n is self-hosted Zapier. More work to set up, but free to run. For simple automations, Claude writes me a Python script that runs as a cron job.
Zapier is still the right choice if you’re non-technical and need complex automations. I don’t—so I don’t.
49. Motion — $19/month → DEAD
Cause of death: AI-assisted prioritization + calendar blocking
Motion was “AI-powered scheduling.” It looked at your tasks and meetings and optimized your calendar.
This was genuinely useful. But I realized I was outsourcing judgment I should be developing. Now I ask Claude “what should I prioritize today given X, Y, Z?” once each morning. Same result, no subscription.
50. Superhuman — $30/month → DEAD
Cause of death: Gmail + keyboard shortcuts + Claude
This one is controversial. Superhuman is beautiful. The speed is real. The keyboard shortcuts are perfect.
But $30/month for email is absurd. Gmail with keyboard shortcuts enabled is 80% of Superhuman. The other 20% wasn’t worth $360/year.
I wrote a Chrome extension (with Claude’s help) that adds the few features I missed. Total cost: an afternoon of work.
Admin Stack Summary:
- Before: $186/month ($2,232/year)
- After: $15/month ($180/year) — minor tool subscriptions
- Savings: $2,052/year
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The Final Tally
┌───────────┬───────────┬─────────┬────────────┐
│ Category │ Before │ After │ Savings │
├───────────┼───────────┼─────────┼────────────┤
│ Design │ $847/mo │ $60/mo │ $9,444/yr │
├───────────┼───────────┼─────────┼────────────┤
│ Writing │ $487/mo │ $20/mo │ $5,604/yr │
├───────────┼───────────┼─────────┼────────────┤
│ Support │ $412/mo │ $97/mo │ $3,780/yr │
├───────────┼───────────┼─────────┼────────────┤
│ Analytics │ $628/mo │ $149/mo │ $5,748/yr │
├───────────┼───────────┼─────────┼────────────┤
│ Dev Tools │ $267/mo │ $40/mo │ $2,724/yr │
├───────────┼───────────┼─────────┼────────────┤
│ Admin │ $186/mo │ $15/mo │ $2,052/yr │
├───────────┼───────────┼─────────┼────────────┤
│ Total │ $4,127/mo │ $381/mo │ $29,352/yr │
└───────────┴───────────┴─────────┴────────────┘
Roughly $30,000 per year back in my theoretical pocket. Not from “switching to cheaper alternatives.” From realizing that AI made entire categories of software unnecessary.
What Survived (And Why)
Not everything died. Some tools got stronger from AI. Understanding why is more valuable than the death list.
Notion — The AI features made it stickier, not weaker. Notion AI writes in context of your workspace. The data moat grew.
Figma — Too embedded in professional workflows. AI can generate images, but designers still need precision tools. The multiplayer features are irreplaceable.
Linear — Best-in-class UX creates genuine lock-in. AI features enhanced it rather than replaced it.
Slack — Network effects trump everything. Your team is on Slack, so you’re on Slack. AI can’t replicate the social graph.
VS Code / Cursor — The IDE is the last thing that dies because everything else runs through it. Cursor is winning because it understood this first.
Vercel / Netlify — Hosting is infrastructure, not software. You can’t replace “run my code” with AI (yet).
Stripe — Payments require trust and integrations built over years. AI can’t disintermediate regulated infrastructure.
The pattern: tools with network effects, deep workflow integration, or infrastructure-level trust survived. Everything else is vulnerable…
Disclosure: I have no financial relationship with any of the “replacement” tools mentioned. The dead tools didn’t pay me either—they just charged me until I noticed.
God-Willing, see you at the next letter.
GRACE & PEACE