The trap is not the price
Most marketing tools cost between $30 and $300 a month. Individually trivial. The trap is that each one arrives with an implicit second cost: someone has to learn it, feed it, and check it. That cost is never in the pricing page.
A tool nobody has time to operate is not cheap. It is a subscription to an intention.
How the stack grows
A problem appears. A tool solves that problem. The tool is adopted in a burst of enthusiasm, used properly for six weeks, then used partially, then only by the one person who set it up. When that person leaves or gets busy, the subscription outlives the usage by years.
Audit any small business stack and you will find the same fossil layers: a CRM with 300 stale contacts, a scheduler with posts queued through last spring, a landing page builder with one page.
The three-question audit
For each tool: who opened it in the last 30 days, what decision did it change, and what happens if we cancel it tomorrow. Anything that fails all three goes. Anything that fails the middle question is a reporting tool masquerading as an operating tool.
Expect to cut 30 to 50 percent of line items on the first pass, and to feel nothing.
What to keep
Keep the systems of record — where your customers, your money, and your website live. Keep whatever your team actually opens daily. Be suspicious of anything whose main output is a chart.
Then put the recovered spend into media, where it can produce a customer instead of a capability.