Inside Rival: How We Use What We Build
This blog is part of Inside Rival, a series where our team shares how we use Rival in our everyday work. From favorite tools to AI agents and automations, we're showing you what we're building, how we're using it and what we've learned along the way.
An operations perspective on finding hidden expenses, negotiating better rates, and why AI still needs a little human oversight – especially with your finances.
If you’re in operations, we’ve all been there. Someone needs a new project management tool. Another team signs up for a marketing platform. Someone else needs a subscription for a project that was supposed to last two weeks and forgot to cancel it.
Six months later, they're all still showing up on the company credit card. And somehow, nobody's entirely sure who owns what.
Working in business operations, I've learned that software subscriptions have a funny way of multiplying. One $30 monthly charge doesn't seem like much. Neither does a $75 charge. But when you start adding up all the tools a growing company uses, those seemingly small expenses can turn into a pretty significant number.
The challenge isn't necessarily finding subscriptions to cancel. It's figuring out which ones are actually necessary, which ones overlap, and whether you're getting the best value for what you're paying.
That's where Rate Slayer came in.
Rate Slayer is an AI agent available on the Rival Marketplace, designed to help identify unnecessary recurring expenses, uncover potential savings, and even assist with negotiating better rates. I wanted to explore how it could approach a problem that many small businesses face: too many subscriptions and not enough time to review them.
And after continuously using Rate Slayer, I came away with three observations:
Finding potential savings is easier than deciding what to cut.
Sometimes negotiating is smarter than canceling.
AI can help you review your expenses, but you should probably still check its math.
Thirteen Subscriptions Walk Into a Budget Review.
For this exercise, I put together a sample software budget for a fictional 12-person startup. I used illustrative expenses to demonstrate the process without sharing confidential company financial information.
The list included 13 familiar subscriptions: Slack, Microsoft Teams, Asana, Monday.com, Zoom, Google Workspace, Dropbox, Adobe Creative Cloud, Canva Pro, Grammarly, HubSpot, Mailchimp, and Notion.
Total monthly spend: $1,730.
Annual spend: $20,760.
Not exactly pocket change for a small business. I gave Rate Slayer the subscription list and asked it to identify potential overlaps, recommend areas worth reviewing, estimate possible savings, and draft a negotiation email. I also gave it one important instruction: don't assume a subscription can be canceled without understanding how the company uses it. Because there's nothing quite like saving $120 a month only to discover you've eliminated the platform your entire operations team relies on.
Rate Slayer got to work. And almost immediately, it started identifying some interesting opportunities.
Do You Really Need Three Ways to Have a Meeting?
One of the first things Rate Slayer noticed was the overlap between communication and collaboration platforms. The company was paying for Slack and Microsoft Teams. It also had Zoom, while Google Workspace already included Google Meet. That's a lot of ways to schedule a meeting that probably could have been an email.
It also flagged Asana and Monday.com as potentially redundant project management platforms, HubSpot and Mailchimp as overlapping marketing tools, and Dropbox as something worth reviewing alongside Google Drive. None of these observations were particularly complicated. But that's part of what made them useful.
When you're managing expenses across multiple teams, it's easy to focus on individual charges instead of stepping back and looking at the entire software stack. Rate Slayer organized the subscriptions by function and highlighted where the company might be paying for similar capabilities more than once.
Of course, similar doesn't always mean unnecessary.
A marketing team might use one platform while an operations team relies on another. Two services might appear interchangeable on paper but support completely different workflows.
And that's where I think the human side of business operations still matters. AI can identify the overlap. Someone who understands the business has to decide whether that overlap is actually a problem.
Turns Out, AI Makes Math Mistakes Too.
Here's where things got interesting.
Rate Slayer's initial analysis reported that the company's monthly software expenses totaled $1,830.
Except they didn't.
The actual total was $1,730.
My AI expense assistant had somehow added an extra $100 to the monthly budget. Which, when you're reviewing expenses to find unnecessary spending, is a pretty unfortunate place to make a math error. It also suggested that Microsoft Teams might be bundled with Google Workspace. That's not correct. Microsoft Teams is a Microsoft product, while Google Workspace includes Google Meet and Google Chat.
So I pushed back.
I asked Rate Slayer to double-check the calculations, explain the discrepancy, and verify its claim about Microsoft Teams. And to its credit, it did.
It acknowledged the $100 addition error, corrected the monthly and annual totals, and clarified the difference between Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. It also recalculated the potential savings based on the correct numbers.
The revised estimate suggested the company could potentially reduce its recurring expenses by approximately 28-29%, or $488–500 per month. That's nearly $6,000 annually.
Now, those aren't guaranteed savings. We hadn't verified actual usage, reviewed vendor agreements, or determined whether consolidating services would create additional costs. But the potential was worth investigating.
And I appreciated that Rate Slayer didn't try to defend its original answer when I questioned it. It corrected the analysis and moved forward. The experience was a good reminder that a polished financial report isn't necessarily an accurate financial report. Especially when nobody has checked the addition.
Sometimes the Best Subscription to Cancel Is None of Them.
One of my favorite parts of the agents analysis wasn't actually about eliminating subscriptions. It was about negotiating.
HubSpot was the company's largest recurring software expense at $450 per month. Rather than recommending that the company abandon the platform, Rate Slayer suggested exploring startup pricing, annual discounts, and subscription tiers better aligned with the company's needs. It even drafted an email asking the vendor about potential pricing options.
And I think that's something businesses often overlook.
When we're trying to reduce expenses, our first instinct is usually to ask what we can cut. But what about the services we genuinely need? Could we reduce unused licenses? Are we paying for features nobody uses? Would a different subscription tier make more sense? Is there a discount available that we've never asked about?
Those questions don't necessarily require replacing a platform or changing how employees work. Sometimes they just require starting a conversation. And having an AI agent help identify those opportunities and draft the outreach makes the process so much easier.
Of course, a negotiation email doesn't guarantee a discount. But it gives you a starting point, which is often the hardest part of a task that keeps getting pushed to next week's to-do list.
Saving Money Is Great. Creating More Work Isn't.
After correcting its initial analysis, I asked Rate Slayer to prioritize the three opportunities that could provide the most value without disrupting daily operations. Its recommendations were fairly practical.
First, review whether Mailchimp was duplicating capabilities already available through HubSpot. If the company could manage its email marketing through one platform, it might save $110 per month.
Second, evaluate whether Asana and Monday.com were both necessary. Consolidating to one project management platform could potentially save another $120-132 per month.
Third, explore negotiating a better rate with HubSpot.
But here's something I've learned working in operations: just because you can eliminate an expense doesn't always mean you should.
A $100 monthly subscription might seem unnecessary until you realize it's saving an already overwhelmed employee five hours of work every week. Or maybe it's handling a repetitive task that frees someone up to focus on something more valuable to the business.
Suddenly, that $100 looks a lot less expensive.
And sometimes the cost of canceling a subscription isn't financial at all. It's the time spent transitioning to another platform, retraining employees, rebuilding workflows, or asking someone who already has a full plate to take on another responsibility. That's why I think understanding the value of a subscription is just as important as understanding its price.
And this is where this agent’s approach became particularly useful.
Normally, reviewing overlapping subscriptions can turn into a surprisingly time-consuming project. You have to figure out who uses each platform, what they're using it for, whether another team relies on the same features, and if everyone could realistically consolidate onto one system.
Before you know it, a simple expense review has turned into five separate conversations and a meeting to discuss whether you need another meeting. Rate Slayer helped me start working through those questions in one place.
Rather than just looking at the price of each subscription, it highlighted overlapping capabilities, identified where consolidation might make sense, and prompted me to consider how different teams actually use their tools.
It didn't magically know every team's workflows, and I'd still need to confirm those details before making changes. But it gave me a much clearer starting point for those conversations. Instead of going to five departments with a vague question about whether they still need their subscriptions, I could come prepared with specific opportunities, potential alternatives, and a better understanding of what needed to be verified.
And that's a pretty significant difference in how I use my time.
Because the goal isn't to eliminate as many subscriptions as possible. It's to make sure the tools you're paying for are actually helping your team do their jobs better, without creating more work in the process.
You Don't Need to Be a Finance Expert to Ask Better Questions.
One thing I appreciated about Rate Slayer was how it organized the information. It didn't just produce a list of subscriptions with a few suggestions to cancel them. It categorized potential overlaps, estimated savings, identified negotiation opportunities, and asked follow-up questions that would help refine the recommendations.
For someone managing a growing business, that's useful.
You don't necessarily need a complicated financial analysis to start identifying unnecessary expenses. Sometimes you just need a clearer picture of what you're paying for and why.
And you don't have to start with a perfect dataset.
A simple list of recurring expenses, their monthly costs, and a little context about how they're used can be enough to begin the conversation. The more information you provide about your business, the more relevant the recommendations can become. Just remember that the recommendations are still recommendations.
Rate Slayer doesn't know that your marketing team depends on a specific integration, that your CEO prefers a particular platform, or that switching vendors would require rebuilding an entire workflow. Unless you tell it. And even then, you're still responsible for deciding what makes sense.
So, Would I Use Rate Slayer Again?
Absolutely. But I wouldn't hand it the company credit card and tell it to start canceling things.
What I found valuable was its ability to take a relatively ordinary list of expenses and turn it into an organized review of potential savings, overlapping services, negotiation opportunities, and questions worth investigating.
It helped identify where to look first. And when I challenged its initial analysis, it corrected its mistakes and refined its recommendations. That doesn't mean every recommendation was perfect. The calculation error alone was enough to remind me that financial information always deserves an extra level of scrutiny.
But I don't think the goal of a tool like Rate Slayer should be to make every financial decision for you. The goal is to make the process of finding opportunities and evaluating options more manageable. For a growing company, where everyone already has more than enough on their plate, that's a pretty useful capability.
One Last Thing.
If you're going to use AI to help review your recurring expenses, my advice is simple.
Give it a complete picture of what you're paying for. Ask it to identify overlaps and potential savings. Challenge the recommendations that don't make sense. And before canceling anything, make sure you understand what that subscription actually does for your business.
You might discover you're paying for tools you don't need. You might find opportunities to negotiate better rates. Or you might learn that your current software stack is more useful than it looks. Either way, you'll have a better understanding of where your money is going.
And if an AI agent tells you it can save your business thousands of dollars?
That's great.
Just check the math first.
Explore Rate Slayer by Kro Bros on the Rival Marketplace.
About the Author
Laura Braun works in business operations at Rival, supporting the financial, administrative, and organizational processes that help keep a growing technology company running. She enjoys finding practical ways to simplify everyday work, improve efficiency, and make complicated processes a little more manageable.