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Coaches and creatorsGrok Bot

Tracking recurring costs by hand replaced: about $4,600 a month cut across 75 subscriptions and services

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

Result

self-reported

His Grok Bot tracked his recurring costs and helped him cut about $4,600 a month across 75 subscriptions and services. His podcast producer bot now handles about 95% of publishing each episode to Substack, YouTube and Libsyn in 30 minutes, a job that used to take him 2 hours. It also built a list of about 70 prospects and pitched 13 podcasts about his book: 5 hosts replied, and four said yes or that they'd love to have the guest he recommended.

Matt Smith runs CrisisInvesting.com, a monthly investing newsletter, and the podcast Doug Casey's Take, plus a handful of side apps. He's one person with seven projects, so Grok Bot is now his main inbox: it filters out the hundreds of junk emails he gets a day and points out only the ones that matter. A spending bot went through his recurring charges and helped him cut about $4,600 a month across 75 subscriptions and services. A producer bot publishes each podcast episode across Substack, YouTube and Libsyn and helps book guests. A marketing bot built about 70 newsletter prospects and sent the first pitches, and reached out to 13 podcasts he had been on before.

Who did it

Matt Smith (@mattpheus)CrisisInvesting.com newsletter and the Doug Casey's Take podcastMatt Smith on X · Nov 1, 2026

Try it now

  1. Export 3 to 6 months of card and bank statements and hand them to one bot whose only job is spending.
  2. Have it list every recurring charge with the amount, how often it bills and the last time you actually used it.
  3. Go down the list yourself and mark keep, cancel or downgrade. You make the call on every one.
  4. Let the bot draft the cancel steps or emails, and check each charge is gone on next month's statement.
  5. Once that runs, give a second bot your most repeated weekly job, like publishing an episode, and time it before and after.
Copy-paste prompt
Go through my last 6 months of card and bank statements and list every recurring subscription or service: name, amount, how often it bills and when I last used it. Sort by monthly cost and suggest which to cancel. Don't cancel anything without my yes.

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 his own X article, and he also promotes his own free beta tool (Sidechannel) at the end. The $4,600 a month is his number across 75 services; yours depends on what you pay for. Safer version: the bot lists and drafts, you cancel, and nothing with money or your name goes out without your OK. Build it with Page: one simple page for your newsletter signup, so the prospects your bot finds have somewhere to land.

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