If you work in marketing, your credit card statement probably looks like a graveyard of SaaS subscriptions.
$99/month for social listening. $149/month for SEO tracking. $49/month for automation glue. Each tool does one thing, charges monthly, and half of them you forgot to cancel.
There is another way.
What marketing tools actually do
Strip away the dashboards and the onboarding emails. Most marketing SaaS tools do something simple:
- Check a website for changes
- Pull data from an API
- Compare numbers to last week
- Send you an email
That is it. The $149/month SEO tool checks your rankings and emails you. The $99/month social listening tool searches for brand mentions and emails you. The automation glue connects things and... emails you.
The script approach
A Python script can do all of this. And with AI APIs, it can do it intelligently.
Competitor monitoring: Fetch their pricing page, their blog, their job board. Use Claude to summarize what changed. Email yourself the digest.
Social listening: Search Twitter, Reddit, Hacker News for your brand. Have Claude categorize the sentiment. Get a weekly report.
SEO tracking: Call the Google Search Console API. Compare this week to last week. Flag anything that dropped more than 10 positions.
Content performance: Pull your analytics. Have Claude write a summary of what performed and what did not. Delivered to your inbox every Monday.
One script per task. Each runs on a schedule. Results arrive by email.
The math
Three marketing SaaS tools: $300/month, or $3,600/year.
Humrun: $10/month for 1,000 script runs. That is 30+ runs per day.
The scripts do exactly what you need because you wrote them. No features you pay for but never use. No annual contracts. No "contact sales for pricing."
When SaaS makes sense
If you need a team dashboard, historical data going back years, or enterprise compliance, a dedicated tool might be worth it.
But if you just want to know when a competitor changes their pricing, or get a weekly summary of your rankings, that is a script. Not a subscription.
Real examples
Weekly competitor digest: Every Monday at 8am, fetch the homepage and pricing page of three competitors. Compare to last week's snapshot. Have Claude summarize the changes. Email arrives before your first meeting.
Brand mention alerts: Every hour, search Twitter and Reddit for your company name. Filter out noise. Email only when something looks important.
SEO position tracker: Every morning, check rankings for your top 20 keywords. Compare to yesterday. Email only if something moved more than 5 spots.
Content performance report: Every Monday, pull the last 7 days of analytics. Have Claude identify the top performers and the underperformers. One email, no dashboard login required.
The shift
Marketing automation does not need to be expensive. Most of it is just: check something, compare it, tell me if it matters.
A scheduled script does exactly that. For the cost of one coffee per month instead of one dinner.
Write the script. Set the schedule. Get the email.
That is marketing automation without the SaaS tax.