Frankenstack cost auditor
Add up every tool in your coaching tech stack. See the real annual cost (subscriptions plus your time), and find out how much a single custom platform would save you.
Monthly tool spend
Your time
Tool admin covers everything from fixing Zaps and chasing failed automations to manually copying data between platforms. Most coaches underestimate this by at least 2 hours.
Your cost breakdown
Monthly tool spend
Annual tool spend
Annual time cost
The true annual cost of your frankenstack
Your tools cost £3,540/year in subscriptions. Add the 6 hours a week you spend keeping them running, and your frankenstack is really costing you £34,700/year.
Time cost is based on your hourly rate as the opportunity cost of admin hours. The actual figure depends on how you'd spend those hours if they were freed up.
What consolidating saves you
Your current stack
Custom platform
Based on a £20,000 build cost and £200/month running cost. Time saved assumes a custom platform removes ~75% of tool-admin hours (no more gluing apps together). Actual costs vary with platform complexity. This is savings only. It doesn't include the revenue upside from productised delivery, taking on more clients, or scaling beyond your calendar.
Ready to replace the duct tape with something purpose-built?
Book a free architecture audit. We'll map your current stack, cost every tool, and show you what a consolidated platform would look like for your coaching business.
Who should audit their coaching tech stack
This auditor is for coaches and consultants running four or more paid tools that don't share data natively. If your coaching business depends on Kajabi, Zapier, Calendly, Circle, Slack, ConvertKit, Notion, and a handful of others glued together with automations, you have a frankenstack. This tool shows you what it's really costing.
Most coaches know what they pay for each subscription. Very few add up the total, and almost none include the time they spend patching things together. The auditor does both: it calculates your annual tool spend and your annual time cost (based on your hourly rate and the admin hours you put in each week). Then it compares the combined figure to the running cost of a single custom platform.
If the output surprises you, read custom coaching platform vs Kajabi for a deeper comparison of what you get (and what you give up) when you consolidate. For a look at what building a replacement actually costs, see what a bespoke coaching SaaS actually costs.
How the tech stack cost audit works
The auditor has two input groups. First, you set the monthly cost for each tool category in a typical coaching stack: course platform, automation, scheduler, community, messaging, email marketing, content tools, and other subscriptions. Second, you enter how many hours per week you spend on admin, tool management, and manual workarounds, plus your hourly rate.
The output shows your total monthly and annual tool spend, your annual time cost (admin hours multiplied by your rate over 48 working weeks), and a comparison against a custom platform running at roughly £200 per month. If the combined saving is positive, it also shows a payback period: how many months of savings it takes to cover a typical £20,000 build cost.
The time-saving estimate assumes a custom platform removes roughly 75% of your tool-admin hours, since you're no longer gluing multiple apps together. That figure is conservative based on platforms we've shipped for coaching businesses.
Once you know the numbers, the next step depends on where you are. If you want to check whether your coaching framework is ready to be encoded into software, take the platform readiness quiz. If you want to see how your current delivery model caps your revenue (regardless of tool costs), use the revenue ceiling calculator.
Everything coaches ask about tool costs
What counts as a frankenstack?
A frankenstack is any collection of disconnected tools duct-taped together to run a coaching business. The typical setup includes a course platform (Kajabi, Teachable), an automation tool (Zapier), a scheduler (Calendly), a community (Circle, Skool), a messaging app (Slack, Voxer), email marketing (ConvertKit, ActiveCampaign), and various other tools like Notion and Loom. If you're running 4 or more paid tools that don't share data natively, you've got a frankenstack.
Why does the auditor include my time as a cost?
Every hour you spend fixing broken Zaps, manually copying client data between platforms, or chasing failed automations is an hour you could spend coaching, selling, or resting. We use your hourly rate as an opportunity cost to show the true price of running fragmented tools. Most coaches underestimate this by 2 to 3 hours per week.
How accurate is the £200/month custom platform cost?
It's a realistic estimate for a coaching platform with fewer than 200 active clients. It covers cloud hosting (£50 to £200), AI inference (£20 to £100), payment processing, domain, email, and monitoring. Actual costs depend on usage patterns, AI workload, and whether you're on a maintenance retainer. Our full cost breakdown covers this in detail.
What does the payback period mean?
It's how many months of total savings (subscriptions plus recovered time) it takes to cover the cost of building a custom platform (estimated at £20,000). For example, if you save £200/month on subscriptions and recover 4.5 hours/week worth £450/week in billable time, your combined monthly saving is around £2,150, giving you a payback period of about 10 months. The time-saving estimate assumes a custom platform removes roughly 75% of your tool-admin hours, since you're no longer gluing multiple apps together.
Can I share my audit results?
Yes. Click 'Share this audit' and the current URL copies to your clipboard with all your inputs embedded as query parameters. Anyone who opens that link sees the auditor pre-filled with your exact numbers. Useful for sharing with a business partner or bookmarking for later.
Should I switch if my stack costs less than £200/month?
Probably not yet. If your total tool spend is below £200/month, a custom platform won't save you money on subscriptions alone. But look at the time cost too. If you're spending 8+ hours a week on admin and tool management, the time savings from consolidation may justify the switch even when the subscription maths is tight.