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Online and software businessesClaude Code

Three software subscriptions replaced with in house tools: £20,000 back in cash flow in nine months

Picked and checked by Olga Pearson, host of The Practical AI Show · Published

Result

self-reported

"Claude Code has saved us £20k in the last nine months." They stopped paying for three pieces of software and built their own versions. Some of the savings went to six Black women on their Weekender media team.

Tobi Oredein is CEO and founder of Black Ballad, a media and data company for Black women in Britain and Europe. She says every subscription and software fee is looked at closely because the business doesn't always get the investment or budgets it deserves. Using Claude Code, the team built their own versions of three tools they had been paying for and cancelled the subscriptions, putting £20,000 back into cash flow so far and paying part of it to the people on their Weekender media team.

Who did it

Tobi OredeinBlack Ballad (media and data company, UK)Tobi Oredein on LinkedIn · Oct 21, 2026

Try it now

  1. List every software subscription and what you pay for it each year.
  2. Mark the ones where you only use a small part of the features.
  3. Pick one simple tool and have an AI coding tool build the part you actually use.
  4. Run both side by side for a month before you cancel the paid one.
  5. Put the savings somewhere on purpose, like she did with her team.
Copy-paste prompt
Here is a list of the software we pay for and what we use each one for. Rank them by how easy they would be to replace with a small tool we build ourselves, and for the easiest one, list exactly what features we'd need to build.

Make it run every week

A play works once. Turn it into a routine in three small steps:

  1. Run it once and check the result yourself.
  2. Give your AI a schedule. Tell it when to run this play (every week, or every month) and to message you with what it found before you act.
  3. Keep a log. One line per run: what was checked, anything flagged, what you did.

See how owners turn plays into systems →

What to watch out for

Self-reported from her own post. Tools you build yourself need someone to keep them running, backed up and secure, and that time is a real cost. Safer version: start with an internal tool that doesn't hold customer payment data. Build it with Page: a member or reader page you own instead of renting another platform.

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