// guide

How to Audit Your Dev Tool Subscriptions (and Find Forgotten Spend)

Dev teams accumulate subscriptions the way kitchens accumulate utensils: one urgent need at a time, then forever. Vercel, Railway, GitHub, Figma, Sentry, Datadog, that monitoring tool from the incident two years ago — each one small, together a four-figure monthly line item nobody owns.

The audit process

1. Collect 12 months of invoices. Search your inbox for "receipt", "invoice", and "payment received" — most dev tools bill by email, and card statements hide vendor detail behind processor names like Stripe and Paddle.
2. Group by vendor and total by month. The pattern you're looking for is drift: tools whose cost grew without a decision, and seats added for people who left.
3. Flag zombies. Anything nobody logged into for 90 days. Check usage dashboards where they exist; ask in Slack where they don't.
4. Flag overlap. Two error trackers, two CI providers, monitoring in three places — consolidation is usually worth one tool's entire bill.
5. Set renewal alerts. Annual renewals are where forgotten spend hides. A calendar reminder two weeks before each renewal turns auto-renew into a decision.

The problem with doing this manually

The audit works — once. Then entropy resumes. New tools get added, prices change, and in six months you're back where you started. The durable fix is making the inventory automatic.

Automating it

Prism does step 1 and 2 continuously: it scans your inbox for invoices from 100+ dev tools (read-only, invoice patterns only), extracts vendor and amount, and keeps a running monthly total per vendor — alongside your OpenAI and Anthropic API spend. Renewal reminders and per-vendor budget alerts handle steps 3–5.