The proptech you bought and never logged into
45% of brokerage leaders say their agents signed up for an AI tool and never learned it. Only 15% of agents say the same about themselves (Inman/Lofty AI survey). Someone in that gap is wrong, and the credit card statement usually settles it. If you have a subscription you have not opened since the onboarding call, you are not unusual. You are the typical case.
How the stack got this way
Nobody sets out to pay for software they do not use. It happens one pitch at a time. A conference booth, a broker-recommended CRM, a lead platform with a minimum term, a video app that was going to change everything. Each one made sense on the day. Ideas & Methods describes the result for small brokerages as a fragmented, duct-taped tech stack, built alongside a deep distrust of lead vendors and a trail of broken onboarding promises (Ideas & Methods). Solo agents are the same, with a smaller budget and no one to blame.
The pattern is consistent. The tool requires you to do something new every week: log in, build a template, upload contacts, record a clip, tag a lead. The first two weeks you do it. The third week a closing runs long. By week six the login is forgotten and the charge is on autopay. The tool was never bad. It was one more job on a day that already had too many.
NAR puts the median Realtor's business expenses at $9,530 in 2025, up from $8,010, with vehicle costs the largest single line at $1,580 (HousingWire on the NAR 2026 Member Profile). Software you do not open is in there somewhere, and it is the only line that produces nothing at all.
The real reason you stopped logging in
It is tempting to say you lack discipline. That is not what the data shows. 62% of agents already spend at least an hour a day on marketing (Placester). You are not short on effort. You are short on hours, and every tool you bought asked for more of them.
Most proptech is sold as a time saver and delivered as a time cost. The promise is "automate your follow-up." The reality is a Tuesday evening building the workflow, a Saturday fixing the merge fields, and a nagging sense that you are now in the software business. That is before you learn it well enough to get results. Among agents using brokerage-supplied AI tools, only 17% report significant gains, against 33% of those who chose their own (Inman, brokerage AI adoption). Even the people who picked the tool themselves are mostly not seeing much.
There is a vendor line you have heard at every booth. Quora's thread on agent frustrations records it word for word: "if you just make one extra sale per quarter you will easily cover the cost" (Quora). It is unanswerable, which is why they use it. The question it dodges is whether the tool produces that sale or just produces more work for you.
An audit you can finish in an hour
Open your card statement and your email receipts. List every recurring charge related to the business. Next to each one, write the date you last logged in. Be honest. Then sort into three groups.
Group one is tools you use weekly. Keep them. Group two is tools you used once and might use again. Cancel them. If you need them later, they will still exist, and you will have saved the months in between. Group three is tools you keep because cancelling feels like admitting a mistake. Cancel those first. The mistake was months ago. The cost is today.
For anything in group one, ask one more question. Does this tool do the work, or does it ask me to do the work? A CRM that sends your emails is doing the work. A video app that waits for you to record is asking. Both can be worth paying for, but only if you have the hours. If you do not, there is a case in solo agent, 70-hour week: what to hand off first for paying people rather than software. It is also worth seeing where the hour a day actually goes, which this itemized breakdown covers.
Software versus service: what to look for next time
The next pitch will come. When it does, ask three questions before the demo starts. What do I have to do every week for this to work? What happens in the month I do nothing? Who fixes it when it is wrong?
A software answer sounds like "log in, upload, configure, and here is the help center." A service answer sounds like "nothing, it still ships, and we do." Brokerage leaders ranked easy adoption second among AI buying factors at 30%, behind integration at 38%, with price last at 7% (Inman/Lofty). Price is last for a reason. The cheap tool you never open costs more than the expensive one that works without you.
Video is where this choice matters most, because it is the format with the highest payoff and the steepest weekly ask. Fewer than 10% of agents use video consistently (reel-e.ai), and the apps that promised to fix that are high on the list of things never opened. If you want the lay of the land before the next demo, the agent's guide to AI real estate video marketing covers what the tools do and do not do. Whatever you buy next, make it something that keeps working during the weeks you forget it exists.
Where MirriFi fits
MirriFi is not software. It is a service. One recording session of about fifteen minutes on your phone, then branded videos arrive monthly in your face and voice. Nothing to install, no dashboard, no login to forget. If you would rather keep making your own content and just need fewer tools, cancel the unused ones and skip this. If you want to see what a done-for-you video looks like before deciding anything, see it on your own face, no card, no call.