The tool you pay for that nobody opens
Published September 15, 2026.
Almost every business has adopted some kind of technology. Fewer than a quarter actually use it. In between, there’s a monthly charge leaving the account and a licence nobody opens.
It’s the gym membership. You bought it in good faith, with the best intentions. You never went. Not because you’re lazy: because there was never an hour set aside for it in the week.
The problem was never the purchase. The problem is that nobody had time to put into it.
I saw the same thing for years with businesses that wanted to sell on Amazon. “Yes, we want to get on there.” Fine. Who on your team has a few hours a week to put into it, every week? If nobody does, it won’t work, and that’s not the platform’s fault.
A tool isn’t a purchase. It’s a commitment of time.
I’m not against tools
Let me be clear about that right away. I love finding a great app. Excellent ones come out all the time, and there’s nothing wrong with buying one.
What I won’t do is choose blind. Every tool has limits, even the most expensive one, even the one everybody uses. The question is never “is this a good tool.” It’s “can I live with its limits.”
A choice with known limits is a good choice. You know what you’re getting, you know what you’re accepting, and you work around it. What costs you is finding out about the limits 18 months later.
Three questions to ask before you sign
Does it do the job? Not the job in general. Yours. The one you actually do, with your exceptions, your special cases, your customers who always ask for the same odd thing. A demo shows you the easy path. Your week isn’t the easy path.
Where are the limits? What it won’t do, what it’ll do halfway, what you’ll still have to do by hand on the side. That list always exists, and don’t count on the vendor to give it to you. Their job is to sell: you’ll get the rosy picture, the nice screenshots and a happy customer’s testimonial. The limits you’ll find once you’re in, when the monthly payments have already started.
Can I get my data back out? All of it. Complete. In a format you can use somewhere else. Not a preview on screen, not a printable report: your data, yours, exported.
The word that should make you raise an eyebrow
“There’s nothing to it, it’s easy. Your data goes right in and comes right back out.”
That’s the line I hear most, and it’s almost always wrong. Nothing is easy. Getting your data into a new system takes work, and so does getting it out.
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go ahead. It means testing it before you sign, not on the day you want to leave. Ask for the export. Look at what comes out. It’s an hour of checking that will tell you exactly what the promise is worth.
It’s not just about software
Take an outside warehouse that handles your shipping. That can be an excellent decision: they do it better than you, for less, and you sleep better.
That’s not where the trap is. The trap is that everything ends up going through them: inventory, orders, returns, data. Two years later, if the service slips or the prices go up, you want to leave and you realize leaving means rebuilding everything. So you stay. Not because it’s good: because getting out costs too much.
It’s exactly the same dependence as the technician who knows everything and is the only one who knows. The tool holds your data, the person holds the know-how. Either way, you no longer have a choice.
And either way, the answer isn’t to do it all yourself. You have to delegate, that’s normal. You just need to keep a copy of what belongs to you, and know ahead of time what that involves.
The free trial is the only time you still have a choice
Almost every tool offers a trial. Almost nobody really uses it. You log in twice, you think it looks great, you sign, and you start paying before you’ve tested anything.
That trial is the most important moment of the whole decision, and it deserves real time from someone. Not a guided tour: your real orders, your real customers, your real messy cases. The full month, with some energy behind it.
Two things you absolutely have to check during that month.
How things work here. A lot of tools are built elsewhere and don’t account for our taxes, the way we invoice, our requirements. That never comes up in a demo. It comes up the first time you send a real invoice.
And the all-in-one promise. I’ve seen software that promised everything (accounting, email, shipping labels, the rest), except that with every module, you had to start over. Re-enter the company information, redo all the settings, module after module. Nothing talked to anything else. That’s exactly what the word “easy” was hiding.
No tool will be perfect, and perfection isn’t what you’re after. It needs to fix the big problems you have today without creating three new ones.
What it looks like in practice
We look at what you’re paying for right now. What gets used, what doesn’t, and why.
Often the tool is fine and what’s missing is half a day of setup and twenty minutes of explaining to the right person. Sometimes it will never do the job, and it’s better to admit that now than to pay for three more years. And sometimes what you already have is enough, once you use it for what it does well.
In all three cases, you’ll know why. And above all, we’ll look at who’s going to take care of it before deciding anything.
Paying for something nobody opens?
We go over what you already have before talking about buying anything. A 30-minute meeting, free and with no strings attached.