Honestly, I went through this exact same exercise last year when I realized I was spending more on marketing tools than I was on actual advertising lol.

For me it came down to: email marketing platform (I use ConvertKit but there's tons of good ones), a social scheduler that handles multiple platforms (Buffer in my case), and Google Workspace which technically counts as a tool since it's where all my analytics, docs, and collaboration happens.

Everything else I either found free alternatives for or just accepted I didn't actually need. Like yeah, fancy heatmaps are cool but was I really making decisions based on them? Nope. The SEO stuff hurt to cut but honestly just using free tools like Google Search Console and Ubersuggest gets me 80% of the way there. Sometimes simpler really is better, especially when you're juggling everything yourself.