Ask it at every renewal. An agency owner in our mastermind started asking, without exception, and the swaps came in at about a tenth of the cost. Rolling their own with an agent came in at a tenth of that. Two years ago I was paying about $6,000 a month for software. I chipped it away one renewal at a time. This is the three questions and the keep / swap / build scorecard that did it.
Rule of thumb from the call: swap at about a tenth, build at about a hundredth. Planning numbers, not a quote.
The three questions
Not "should we cancel." Nobody cancels the thing that runs the business. The question is whether the price of the alternative changed by 10x since you signed. For most of your stack, it did.
Same job, built after the models got good. Reporting, decks, transcription, scheduling, first-line support, most of the dashboard category.
If the data is reachable, the tool is a couple of hours of agent work with the exact features you want and nothing else. No 58 things you never click.
Hard rules go to code. Judgment calls go to an agent. Get this one wrong and you build the wrong thing in either direction.
Every single surface area of my business besides sales calls and the event itself can be run by agents.
Brad Hart, on the mastermind call this audit came from
The verdict
Run every line of the bill through the three questions and it lands in one of three columns. Take the cheapest column first. One of the agency's lines went "swap this year, build next year." That is the right shape. You are not doing this overnight, you are chipping away.
The shift
The renewal auto-bills. Nobody on the team owns the question. The stack is whatever you bought two years ago, when "it takes money to make money" was the only rule you had.
Every renewal hits the three questions before it hits the card. You keep what earns its place, swap what got 10x cheaper, and your agents build the rest to your exact spec. You are the architect of the stack, not its tenant.
Where it came from
This audit is lifted from a weekly Optimus Mastermind call. Real owners, real bills, the exact sequence they run. Names stripped, numbers kept.
FAQ
The three questions, the keep / swap / build scorecard you can run on your own bill, worked examples from the call it came from, and the code-or-agent rule. The scorecard is a tool you fill in, print, or export.
Business owners and the leadership team who sign the renewals. If you have a real software bill and a team of five to fifty, this is for you.
No. One of the people on the call who built her own task board had never written code. The first version of everything sucks, then it gets better.
None. It's free. Drop your email and it's yours, along with the rest of the free library at optimus.university.
Run it through the three questions first. Drop your email and the audit is in your inbox.