How to Audit Your SaaS Stack and Actually Cut Costs

Most teams have no idea what they actually spend on SaaS tools each month. Not approximately. Not in the right ballpark. They do not know. The subscriptions are spread across a dozen credit cards and company accounts, billed annually so the charge only stings once a year, and nobody has sat down and added it all up.

When someone finally does that exercise, the number is almost always a surprise. A 10-person team running a fairly typical stack can easily spend $3,000 to $5,000 per month on software before a single line of product code is written. That is $36,000 to $60,000 per year going to vendors, some of whom you may have signed up with and largely forgotten about.

This is a framework for doing that audit properly, finding the waste, and making informed decisions about what to cut, what to downgrade, and what is worth every dollar.

Start with the money, not the tools

Before you look at a single tool, pull twelve months of credit card statements. All of them: company card, personal cards that get expensed, anything going through accounts payable. The charges are scattered across payment sources on purpose; that's how subscriptions survive. You can't cut what you can't find.

Start with these sources:

• Company credit card statements for the past 12 months
• Accounts payable or expense reports if billing goes through finance
• Email inboxes for receipts: search for "receipt", "invoice", and "subscription"
• Ask each department lead what tools their team uses
• Check for tools billed to personal cards that get expensed

For each tool, record: the tool name, what it is used for, who owns the account, how many seats are active, the monthly or annual cost, and the renewal date. A simple spreadsheet is fine. The goal is one place where everything is visible.

Find the duplicates. There are always duplicates.

Once you have the full list, group tools by function: CRM, project management, communication, monitoring, email, design, analytics, security, and so on. What you will almost certainly find is that you are paying for multiple tools that do the same thing.

Common duplicates I see in small teams:

• Two project management tools: one the engineering team chose, one the rest of the company uses. Both are paid.
• Slack and Microsoft Teams: one from a prior era, one added when the company moved to Microsoft 365, both still active.
• Multiple analytics tools: Google Analytics plus Mixpanel plus something someone added for a specific campaign and never removed.
• Overlapping monitoring: Datadog for infrastructure, New Relic for APM, PagerDuty for alerting, and a fourth tool someone added for uptime checks.

For each category where you have duplicates, identify which tool is actually being used by most of the team. The others are candidates for cancellation.

Usage data doesn't lie

Having a subscription does not mean anyone is using it. For each tool on your list, check the actual usage data. Most SaaS tools have admin dashboards that show last login dates, active users, and feature usage.

The questions to answer for each tool:

• How many of the paid seats had a login in the last 30 days?
• How many had a login in the last 90 days?
• Are there features in the paid plan that nobody has ever used?
• Would the free tier have covered actual usage this quarter?

A seat that has not been logged into in 90 days is almost certainly a candidate for removal. An annual plan where you are using 3 of 20 seats is a candidate for downgrade at renewal.

Three buckets: keep, fix, kill

After the usage audit, every tool on your list belongs in one of three places:

Keep as-is: The tool is actively used, the plan tier is appropriate for actual usage, and the cost is justified. No action needed.

Downgrade or optimize: The tool is used but you are paying for more than you need. Unused seats can be removed. A paid plan can be dropped to a lower tier or free tier. An annual commitment can be moved to month-to-month while you evaluate whether to keep it.

Cancel: The tool is not being used, duplicates another tool, or was solving a problem that no longer exists. Cancel before the next renewal.

Be honest about this classification. It is easy to talk yourself into keeping something because someone might use it someday, or because switching costs feel high. If a tool has under 20 percent of seats active for 90 days, the switching cost almost certainly pays for itself in six months.

Negotiate everything over $500 a year

Most SaaS companies will negotiate on price, especially at renewal time and especially if you are reducing seats or considering a competitor. This is not aggressive or unusual. It is expected.

For any annual contract over $500 per year, it is worth a 15-minute call or email to ask whether they can do better on price. Specific things to ask about:

• Annual prepay discount (if you are currently month-to-month)
• Volume discount if you are adding seats
• Startup or small business pricing if you qualify
• Competitive pricing if you have a comparable quote from a competitor

Vendors would rather give you a 20 percent discount than lose the account. The worst they can say is no.

What a 10-person team typically spends

To give you a reference point, here is what a typical 10-person engineering-led team spends on core SaaS categories at standard pricing:

At mid-tier selections across these categories, a 10-person team is looking at $700 to $1,000 per month just for core tools. Scale that to 25 people and you are at $1,700 to $2,800 per month. These numbers do not include industry-specific tools, sales tools, marketing platforms, or data infrastructure.

The free tier is often enough

One of the most underutilized moves for small teams is the free tier. Many of the best tools in each category have actually useful free plans that cover the needs of teams under 10 people.

Linear's free tier handles up to 250 issues, which is plenty for a small team. Grafana Cloud's free tier covers 10,000 metrics and 50GB of logs. HubSpot's free CRM handles a million contacts with no time limit. For a team of five people in the early stages of a product, these free tiers are not compromises. They are the right tool at the right time.

The discipline is revisiting the decision as you grow. What works for five people on free tiers is not the same conversation as what works for 50 people who need SSO, audit logs, and admin controls. The audit is not a one-time exercise. It belongs on a quarterly calendar.

The audit checklist

Pricing in this article reflects standard published rates as of April 2026. Most vendors offer discounts for annual billing, volume, and startups that are not reflected in base pricing. Always verify current pricing on the vendor's website before making decisions.