Ask HN: Have you cancelled any software subscriptions because AI replaced them? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Have you cancelled any software subscriptions because AI replaced them?

10 pointsmaxim_bg14 comments

I went through all my subscriptions recently and haven't cancelled a single one because of AI - neither has my girlfriend.

I built some small tools and browser extensions for myself that I use daily. But honestly, I wouldn't have paid for those anyway — maybe a one-time small purchase, but never a subscription.

Curious if others had a different experience. Did you cancel something because chat with LLMs replaced it? Or did you build your own thing and make a paid tool redundant?

View on HN

Canva - I used it for simple designs but ChatGPT is better

Grammarly - ChatGPT and Claude are way better, and much more customizable. If I were a human editor I'd be very worried.

On the flip side, using ChatGPT for diagrams made me pay for Mermaid. It might only be a one year subscription.

> If I were a human editor I'd be very worried.

Proofreaders, perhaps. But spellcheckers are superior, free, battle-tested, and ubiquitous anyway, yet people still can't be troubled to use them. As proof, behold comments on any given HN post.

True, LLMs can convert style — but so far I've found that the edits always pick up an LLM smell.

My pet hypothesis is that genuine upper-echelon writing, editing, and taste-making will become even more valuable than before.

what does it mean to pay for mermaid

Chegg is a service many students used to get guidance and answers to homework problems for whatever courses they were taking. It was a sinking ship once GPT 4 came out, but GPT 5 was really it's final nail in the coffin.

I don't know any student that really uses it now.

We replaced our CRM with an in-house solution. Since our main use case was simply sending emails to lists, it made more sense for us to manage those lists in Google Sheets and build an LLM-powered workflow for email outreach and nurturing.

Yep. We've canceled some software we could build internally. But biggest win was deploying our own agents to help with the business. So in general, we spend more more money - not less.

> But biggest win was deploying our own agents to help with the business.

Can you tell us more?

There are a few personal scripts I replaced with an LLM prompt/skill. Can't really think of any subscriptions though.

Grammarly and Squarespace. I have a Gost Pro newsletter I am replacing next with my own custom solution.

grammarly

Are they still in business? They merged with Duolingo, right?

Duolingo is going to teach people wrong so they have to use Grammarly :P

What about the inpalce corrections when you are typing or do you just copy and paste into a chat?

Not having that is a feature IMO. At work I wrote an .md and asked Rovo (similar to Claude Code) to check it.

In similar news I'll probably stop the tab suggestions in GH Copilot now and just agent all the things.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com