It is January 2026. You are likely reviewing your P&L and congratulating yourself on a decent year. You see the line item for "Software & Subscriptions", and you probably glaze over it. It is just the cost of doing business.

You are wrong.

If you are a company of 20 people, you are likely overspending by roughly $5,000 every single month on redundant software. That is $60,000 a year of pure waste. That is a full-time junior employee. That is your marketing budget for a quarter. It is being burned.

Why is this happening? Because you are buying tools to solve problems that are already solved by the ecosystem you pay for every month.

The standard startup stack usually looks like this. You pay for Slack because you think email is too slow. You pay for Zoom because you remember Meet being buggy in 2021. You pay for Notion because you find Google Docs ugly. You pay for Calendly because scheduling is hard. You pay for Loom or Vidyard because async video is trending.

Then you pay for Google Workspace to host your email.

Do you see the problem? You are paying a premium for Google Workspace, yet you treat it like a glorified PO Box. You are stripping away all the utility you are already paying for and outsourcing it to five other vendors who charge you $15 to $30 per user per month.

The Consolidation Math

Let us look at the raw numbers for a 20 person team. Slack Business is about $15 per user which is $300 a month. Zoom Pro is $16 per user which is $320 a month. Notion Team is $10 per user which is $200 a month. Calendly Teams is $16 per user which is $320 a month. Loom Business is $12.50 per user which is $250 a month.

That is nearly $1,400 a month in basic seat costs. But that is not the real cost. The real cost is the "Enterprise Tax" of fragmentation.

When your data lives in Notion, but your files live in Drive, and your chats live in Slack, you destroy your company's searchability. Your team spends hours every week just looking for things. Asking "is that in the Slack channel or the Notion doc?" is the most expensive question in modern business. Furthermore, you are managing five different admin panels. Five different billing cycles. Five different security vulnerabilities.

The founders who are winning in 2026 are not the ones with the flashiest tech stack. They are the ones with the most streamlined operations. They realize that good enough native integration always beats best in class fragmentation.

The Slack Replacement Strategy

Moving from Slack to Google Chat requires culture management because Slack is addictive. The mistake most founders make is just cutting Slack cold turkey without a replacement plan.

The strategy is to create "Spaces" rather than just dumping people into chat. Recreate your core Slack channels like #general, #marketing, and #wins as Google Chat "Spaces." You must enable threading to prevent the chat from becoming a waterfall of noise.

The hook for your team is search. Remind your team that Chat is searchable via Cloud Search. They can search a term and find it across email, Drive, and Chat instantly. Slack cannot do that. By unifying your communication layer, you stop the context switching that kills productivity.

The Notion Alternative

You do not need a separate wiki. You need Smart Canvas.

Open a new Google Doc and type the "@" symbol. You will see a dropdown menu. You can now insert "Building Blocks" like meeting notes, product roadmaps, and project trackers directly into the Doc. These blocks are dynamic and can embed a checklist that syncs with Google Tasks.

The move here is to transition your "Company Home" page from Notion to a single, well formatted Google Doc using the "Pageless" view setting. This makes it look like a web page, not a letter. It allows you to embed live charts from Sheets and live timelines from Calendar. It turns a static document into a live dashboard.

Killing Calendly for Good

This is the easiest switch you will make all year. Google Calendar's "Appointment Schedules" are now robust and professional.

Open Google Calendar and create an "Appointment schedule." Set your blocks. The interface looks almost identical to Calendly. You can now collect payments, limit daily bookings, and add buffer times. Once you create your booking link, replace your email signature link immediately and cancel your Calendly subscription.

By executing these moves, you reduce your software vendors from six to one. You simplify your billing. You secure your data. And most importantly, you stop bleeding cash.

Get your streamlined account set up now. Get Google Workspace.