The SaaS Stack Audit: What We Kept, Cut, and Added

The company had been growing fast - from 12 to 45 people in two years - and the SaaS stack had grown with it, mostly organically, without a lot of deliberate decision-making. When the CFO asked me to audit the software budget, I expected to find some redundancy. I did not expect to find $84,000 in annual spend that was essentially wasted.

This is the story of that audit, including what we found, why it was there, and what we did about it.

The Audit Methodology

I started by pulling every software subscription from the company credit card statements and expense reports. This took two days and produced a spreadsheet with 67 line items.

For each item, I asked four questions:

1. Who is actually using this? (not "who is licensed" - who is actually logging in)
2. What would happen if we turned it off?
3. Is something we already pay for doing most of the same job?
4. What is the cost per active user?

The last question is revealing. A tool at $200/month for 40 licensed users is $5/user. The same tool with only 8 active users is $25/user - five times the cost per unit of value delivered.

The Cuts

Duplicate functionality (4 tools, $28,000/year): The company had three note-taking/documentation tools - Confluence, Notion, and Google Docs being used heavily for the same purpose. We kept Notion, deprecated Confluence (with a 60-day migration period), and designated Google Docs for external-facing documents that needed to be shared with clients who do not have Notion access.

Similarly, we had both Zoom and Google Meet being actively used with no policy about which to use when. Since Google Meet was included in the existing Google Workspace subscription at no additional cost, we eliminated Zoom for internal meetings and saved $14,400/year.

Low adoption tools (5 tools, $31,000/year): Five tools had under 20% adoption - fewer than 9 of 45 people logging in at least weekly. When I interviewed the teams who were licensed for these tools, the answers were consistent: "I was supposed to start using it" or "I tried it once and went back to my old way."

None of these tools were solving critical problems. They were solutions to problems that were real but not acute enough to drive behavior change. We cancelled all five.

Overprovisioned tiers (3 tools, $25,000/year): Three tools were on enterprise or business tiers when the actual usage patterns would have been served by a lower tier. The culprit is usually an initial procurement decision made when the company was smaller ("we will grow into it") that never got revisited.

Downgrading these three tools to tiers that matched actual usage patterns saved $25,000 with zero functionality lost.

The Adds

After the cuts, we reinvested about $30,000 of the savings into three tools that solved real problems:

A proper security tool ($8,000/year): The company was running without a centralized identity management and SSO solution. After the SaaS audit surfaced how many accounts existed with how many different credentials, getting this under control became clearly urgent. We implemented Okta.

An engineering analytics tool ($12,000/year): The engineering team had been arguing about sprint velocity and cycle time for months without the data to have a productive conversation. A DORA metrics tool gave them the data they needed to have evidence-based conversations about process.

A proper project management tool for sales ($10,000/year): Sales was using a mix of spreadsheets and Notion database pages to track deals. This is not a knock on Notion - it was the wrong tool for CRM use cases. We added Pipedrive and the sales team's pipeline visibility improved immediately.

What Made the Cut Easy to Execute

The hardest part of a SaaS audit is not identifying the waste - it is getting people to accept the cuts. A few things helped:

• Data first: Showing people their own adoption numbers made the conversation factual rather than political. It is hard to argue for keeping a tool when the data shows 3 of 40 licensed users logged in last month.
• Migration support: We gave teams 60 days to migrate data from deprecated tools and dedicated 2 engineering days to help with migrations. Respecting the transition time reduced resistance.
• Clear ownership: After the audit, every tool has a named owner responsible for monitoring adoption and renewing or cancelling at contract time.

The Ongoing System

The lesson from this audit: tool sprawl is a growth artifact, not a failure. Every company that grows quickly ends up with redundancy. The mistake is not having it - the mistake is not auditing it regularly.

We now do a quarterly software review - 30 minutes, check adoption rates on tools over $500/month, flag anything below 50% adoption for discussion. It takes less time and catches problems earlier.

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