Finding
SaaS obesity
More tools than the team has processes, and nobody owns the list.
Every tool on the list was bought to solve something real. The problem is not any one of them; it is that nobody has ever looked at the list as a list. Two of them overlap, one is paid for by a team that stopped using it, and at least one renews annually on a card nobody checks.
The cost that hurts is not the subscription. It is that the same data now lives in four places with four opinions about it, so every question that spans two teams needs a person to reconcile them by hand — which is a manual conveyor, wearing a different hat.
The fix rarely starts with cancelling anything. It starts with drawing the list and finding out which tool is the system of record for what.
Shows up on the card first and in the reconciliation work second.
How it shows up
- The card statement carries names nobody in the room recognises.
- Two tools do the same job because two teams each bought one.
- A seat is still billed for somebody who left months ago.
- Renewal happens by silence rather than by decision.
- Where a given number lives depends on who you ask.
How to put a number on it
Pull twelve months of card statements and write one line per tool: what it does, who uses it, when it was last opened, and what a year of it costs. The list is usually longer than anyone guesses before they make it.
Anything nobody can name a current user for is the answer. When I did this to my own company the list was twenty-two subscriptions and $9,760 a year, and seventeen of them went.
What to do this week
Cancel the three nobody defended in the meeting. If one of them turns out to matter, resubscribing takes four minutes and you have learned who actually uses it, which the list could not tell you.
Then give the list an owner and a date. The reason it grew is that renewals are a decision nobody is assigned to make, and a list without a name against it becomes the same list again by spring.
The next step
Half an hour is usually enough to find the two tools that overlap, and that is where the money is.
Find out what this is called →