Acme is a 6-employee scratch bakery in Miami. They've been operating for 11 years, run on tight margins, and like most small businesses had accumulated a decade of recurring charges nobody had audited since the owner signed up.
What Pulse found in week 1
- An Adobe Creative Cloud seat for a designer who left in 2024 ($55/mo)
- Two delivery-app "business" tiers that overlapped on the same orders ($89/mo combined)
- An old POS reporting tool replaced by Toast 18 months ago ($129/mo)
- A "premium" marketing platform last logged into 11 months prior ($199/mo)
- Three small SaaS tools (calendar, scheduling, file sharing) for an old employee — $87/mo total
- A monthly equipment service plan for an oven they no longer owned ($199/mo)
The math
Total monthly waste: $760. Annualized: $9,120. For context, that's about one month of payroll for Acme.
The 30-minute cleanup
The owner spent half a Friday afternoon canceling. Pulse's recurring-charges card listed each one with the vendor, last-used signal, and total spent to date. Sort by total spent → cancel from the top. By Monday all seven were killed.
What else Pulse did in month 1
Beyond the subscription audit, Pulse caught a 4-week slow stretch coming in May (a typical post-Mother's-Day dip). The owner pre-emptively shifted some payroll timing and avoided what last year had been a tight cash week.