Claude found $1,387/mo I was wasting (profit audit)

Summary

most people are trying to make money with AI before they have saved any. start with the boring win: a profit audit. I ran one with Claude on my actual expenses and cut $1,387.29 a month, and most of that did not come from forgotten subscriptions. it came from Claude challenging me on the stuff I decided to keep.

here is how the profit audit works:

1. one transaction at a time. the prompt walks your bank statement line by line and makes you say keep or cut on each one, so you actually have to decide whether you still need it.
2. cut means done for you. say cut and Claude finds the company, digs up their support email, drafts the cancellation, and drops it in your Gmail drafts to send when you are ready.
3. keep means get challenged. this is where the real money is. say keep and Claude proposes a cheaper path. the biggest one for me was moving a stack of high traffic sites off WP Engine and onto Netlify, which can be free at low traffic and runs about 20 dollars a month at high traffic.

no willpower required, nothing to deal with later. sit down with the prompt and your statement and get it done. the audit alone can pay for a year of Claude. and once the one time cleanup is over, the next move is turning that 20 dollar a month subscription into a 5,000 dollar a month employee.

Transcript

the setup

are you frustrated that you are not making money with AI yet? do not worry, most people are not. let me show you how to save some money with AI instead, because that is really where you should start. I am going to walk you through a process that so far has saved me $1,387.29 per month. 99 percent of business owners are either oversimplifying or overcomplicating their use of AI, and this video is neither. I am going to show you a simple, easy profit audit you can run today and save some cash. if you do not know who I am, my name is Jerred Moon.

I have hit the Inc. 500 twice, I run five total companies, and I am optimizing all of them with AI one week at a time, showing you the systems that work. so if you are ready to build something cool, let’s dive straight in.

how the audit works

what we are doing is a profit audit. you can run this on your business or your personal finances. you do not need Claude to do it, but Claude is going to help you save money and find alternatives you would not think of on your own. the first thing the prompt does is present you one transaction at a time, so you have to come face to face with whether you should still be paying for Netflix, or monday.com, or whatever it is.

I highly recommend keeping it one transaction at a time so you are actually forced to think: do I still need this, or could I do without it? for each one, you tell it keep or cut. if you cut, it goes and finds that company, scours their website for the support email, drafts a cancellation email, and drops it in your Gmail drafts folder so you can send it when you are ready. a lot of these services also have easy self cancel options, and if you want it gone fast that is probably quicker. if you keep, this is where it gets interesting: it challenges you and proposes a cheaper path.

the challenge that saved the most

almost all of that nearly 1,400 dollars a month I saved came from the challenge part of the prompt, not just finding stuff I forgot to cancel. what it did was propose cheaper paths. the best example is moving from WP Engine to Netlify. I had a lot of websites hosted on WordPress, and I have wanted to move off WordPress forever: there are security issues, and it can be slow. these were fairly high traffic sites, so I was spending real money on WP Engine. Claude told me that if I migrated those sites to static HTML hosted on Netlify, I would save a pile of cash, because Netlify can be free for a low traffic site and runs up to about 20 dollars a month for a high traffic one. that was a significant savings, and it was not even something I was thinking about.

running it live

so let’s run the audit. it tells me to say go, and we are off. transaction one of 69. this is a fake statement, because I am not going to put all my real financial information in a public video, but I do pay for monday.com across multiple businesses. monday.com, keep or cut?

I am going to say keep, and watch what it does. it says I am already paying for Monday, Asana, Airtable, and Notion, and Monday is not doing anything Notion or Asana cannot do. it proposes consolidating into Notion that I am already paying for, zero additional dollars, same outcome. if that were real I would be saving 149 there, 300 there, 240 there. so by keeping one tool I am canceling another. it ran the cancellation process, found the billing page, drafted the email, and put a follow up in my Google calendar. next transaction, Google Workspace, 216 a month. I say keep. it does not push a replacement, because that one is hard to leave, but it does tell me to audit the seats, drop power users down, and trim where I can. that is where the real magic is: it challenges you to save money.

cut the leaks

the real takeaway is to cut the leaks. there is no willpower required and nothing to deal with later. sit down with this prompt inside Claude and your bank statement, and just get it done. this one is simple and easy, and it can increase your profit today. it can pay for your Claude subscription for a year on its own. cutting dead subscriptions is a great start, but it is a one shot deal. if you want to keep saving money, spend the 20 dollars a month on Claude and turn it into a 5,000 dollar a month employee. I have a few simple prompts for that in my video on how to make Claude your executive admin assistant. watch that one next, then go build something cool.