---
title: "The Freelance Category I Stopped Paying For"
url: "https://gigsmagazine.com/insight/the-freelance-category-i-stopped-paying-for/"
author: "Lilach Bullock"
published: "2026-09-25"
updated: "2026-09-25"
---

# The Freelance Category I Stopped Paying For

### **The board**

I have been a freelancer and a consultant for 21 years, and for most of that time I have also hired freelancers of my own, so I sit on both sides of this. I still had no clean picture of where the money went every month until I built a dedicated board in monday.com to track it. I set up Numbers columns that multiply cost per hour by hours spent on each project automatically, so instead of trawling through old invoices at the end of the month I could see the total sitting there at a glance.

I built it because I manage freelancers and remote workers across different time zones, and guessing at spend had started to bother me more than the actual bills did. I wanted one place that told me the truth without me having to go looking for it.

### **The category**

Once the numbers were sitting in front of me instead of buried across separate email threads, one line stood out straight away. I was paying an outsourced designer somewhere between 400 and 600 dollars a month for recurring business images, social tiles, blog graphics, the occasional deck. Nothing dramatic happened in any single month; that was the point. It was the repetition that got me, the same category showing up on the board every four weeks like clockwork, and I started asking myself whether that specific slice of work still needed a person on the other end of it.

### **The test**

I did not cancel anything on a hunch. I ran ChatGPT Images 2.0 against the same kind of work the designer had been doing, mostly business images, and tested it over real projects before I made a decision either way. It covered the same ground for less money, so I cancelled Canva Pro too once I could see the tool held up under normal use rather than just a nice demo. The designer I had paid for that recurring work for years is gone now, and the work itself did not stop; it just moved.

### **What went wrong**

I am not going to pretend the tool is perfect, because it is not. When I tested it on a featured image built around an infographic pulled straight from one of my own articles, it rounded a click rate down from 1.69 percent to 1.2 percent without saying a word about it, and it invented a category called Life and Mindset that did not exist anywhere in the original piece. It just made something up that sounded plausible enough to slip past a quick glance. So now I check every number and every label in an AI-generated image against the source article before it goes anywhere near publish, the same way I used to check a designer's proof, except the mistakes I am hunting for are a different kind entirely.

### **What's left**

I have not hired a freelance designer for blog graphics, social tiles, lead magnets or decks in two or three years, and I am not planning to next year either, not for that category. That is not a verdict on designers as people; some of the best work I have ever paid for over 21 years came from one. It is a verdict on one narrow, repeatable slice of design work that an image tool now handles well enough, fast enough, for a fraction of what I was spending. I go through subscriptions and browser extensions the same way every few months, which is how I ended up cutting extensions from twelve down to five earlier this year, the same logic each time: if it is not earning its keep it goes.

---

[Lilach Bullock](https://www.lilachbullock.com) is an AI implementation consultant and fractional CMO with 21 years in marketing. She helps business owners put AI to work across content, SEO, social media, email marketing, automation and lead generation. Her work has been featured in Forbes, the BBC, The Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph, WIRED, HuffPost and the Content Marketing Institute, and she has worked with Twitter, IBM, Dropbox, monday.com, Hootsuite and Greenpeace. Forbes named her a Top 20 Social Media Power Influencer worldwide. Based in Israel, she works with US, UK and international clients.