I Got Tired of Paying $300/Month for Tools I Hated. So I Built My Own.

The moment I actually counted.

I remember the exact day I did the math. It was November, near end of year. I was reviewing my business expenses and I put all the tool subscriptions in one column for the first time. Not just the obvious ones — all of them. The project management tool. The time tracker. The note-taking app. The spreadsheet add-ons. The scheduling tool. Total: €340 per month. Not including the new tools I kept trialling because the ones I had weren't quite right. For a freelancer working alone or with a small team, that number felt absurd. Not because I couldn't afford it — I could — but because what I was getting for it was a fragmented, irritating, disconnected set of tools that made my workday worse, not better. The thing about subscription software is that it's designed to be cheap enough that you don't think about it individually. €14/month for Notion. Of course. That's nothing. €18/month for Toggl. Fine. But the business model depends on you never adding them up. The moment you do, the logic falls apart.

The real problem wasn't the money.

I want to be honest here: the money was annoying but it wasn't the core issue. The core issue was that my tools didn't talk to each other — and that gap lived in my head. I'd complete a task in ClickUp. Then manually start a timer in Toggl. Then update the project status in Notion. Then look at Excel to see if the hours I was logging were within the estimate. Four separate actions, four separate apps, for one thing that happened: I worked on something. The cognitive overhead of maintaining four separate systems — keeping them in sync, remembering which tool had which information, figuring out which one to open when a client messaged about a project — was enormous. It was invisible overhead. The kind that doesn't show up on an invoice but drains you steadily over months. The worst part: I was supposed to be helping my clients get organised. And my own workflow was chaos.

I tried everything first.

Before I built anything, I tried everything. Monday.com. Asana. Linear. Basecamp. Trello (which I outgrew in about six weeks). Jira (which felt like it was designed for a 200-person engineering team, not a five-person creative agency). Airtable, which I genuinely liked but couldn't convince my clients to use. Each tool had something. None had everything. And every switch cost two weeks of migration, reconfiguring, and re-convincing whoever was working with me at the time to learn a new interface. The consistent pattern: tools built for large teams are too heavy for small ones. Tools built for individuals don't scale when you bring a second person in. Tools that try to do everything do most things poorly. Tools that specialise force you to use five tools instead of one. I kept coming back to the same thought: what I actually needed was a task manager, a time tracker, and a way to see if my projects were profitable. Three things. Not thirty.

So I started building.

I want to be clear about what Melororium is and isn't. It's not a venture-backed startup with a growth team optimising for user acquisition. It's a tool I built because I was personally fed up — and because I thought other freelancers and small agency owners were probably just as fed up. The first version was genuinely rough. A Kanban board that worked, a time tracker that sat inside the tasks so you didn't need to switch apps, and a simple project view. No AI. No integrations. No onboarding flow. Just the core thing. I used it myself for three months before showing it to anyone. Which meant it got better fast — not because I was optimising metrics, but because I was living with the friction every day. The decision that felt most uncomfortable at the time turned out to be the most important: one-time payment. No subscriptions. You pay once, you own it. If you need a single module, buy that module. If you need everything, buy everything. No monthly invoice. No annual renewal. No 'we're changing our pricing structure' email.

Why one-time payment matters more than it sounds.

Subscription pricing creates a specific kind of relationship between a product and its users. The product needs you to keep paying. Which means it needs you to keep feeling slightly dissatisfied — close enough to satisfied that you don't cancel, but not so satisfied that you stop exploring alternatives. This isn't a conspiracy. It's just the incentive structure. Subscription software companies benefit from users who are moderately engaged, moderately sticky, and moderately unhappy. The goal is retention, not delight. One-time payment changes the relationship entirely. Once you've paid, I have no financial incentive to keep you artificially dependent on me. My incentive is to make the product so good that you tell other people about it — because word of mouth is the only growth lever that works when you're not running a subscription retention machine. It also changes the user's relationship to the tool. A subscription tool feels rented. A one-time purchase feels owned. Owned things get used differently — with more investment, more customisation, more willingness to build workflows around them.

What I actually built.

Melororium right now is three things that work together as one.

• Task Tracker — A Kanban board with list and calendar view. Tasks have descriptions, deadlines, assignees, and built-in timers. You don't start a separate time tracking app. You click the timer inside the task. When you stop, the time is logged against the task.
• Timers — Not a separate app. A module that lives inside the workspace. Time tracked per task, per project, per client. The data that used to live in Toggl and get manually compared to ClickUp now lives in one place and updates automatically.
• Integrations — Slack and Gemini are live. Slack because that's where client communication happens for most teams. Gemini because AI assistance inside your workflow is now table stakes, not a differentiator.

What's coming — and why I'm telling you now.

Budget Planner is coming in Q3 2027. This is the module that closes the loop I've been chasing since the beginning: not just tracking time, but seeing whether a project is profitable once you account for time, direct costs, and the rate you're billing at. The Excel replacement I always needed but never had built into my workflow. Etsy Integration is coming in Q3 2026 — for the Etsy sellers who've told me they're running their shops on a combination of sticky notes and optimism. And an AI and SMM assistant in Q1 2027 for the social media managers and content teams who've asked for something that actually understands their workflow. I'm telling you now because the people who join early get the best price and get to influence what gets built. Waitlist members get access first. If you've been paying €300/month for tools you're moderately annoyed by, now is a good time to try something built by someone who was in exactly that position.

The honest version of the pitch.

I'm not going to tell you Melororium will solve all your productivity problems. I'm going to tell you what it actually does: it combines the core functionality of a project management tool, a time tracker, and a team coordination system into one workspace that you pay for once. If you're a freelancer, you get a task system and a time tracker that talk to each other, at a price that doesn't require a monthly decision about whether to keep paying. If you're running a small agency of three to seventeen people, you get a team workspace where everyone can see what's happening, time gets tracked where work happens, and the per-seat pricing model doesn't punish you for growing. If you're an Etsy seller trying to run a real business on a spreadsheet and intuition, you get an operations system that was designed for exactly your situation. That's the pitch. It's not glamorous. But I've been building tools for people who do real work, and real work doesn't need glamour. It needs something that works every day and doesn't invoice you for the privilege.