The SaaS subscription audit: what most SMBs find when they look

We do free SaaS audits as part of the consulting engagement. The owner gives us a list of every monthly software bill, we sit down for an hour, and we figure out what's actually being used and what's not. We've now done several dozen of these. The patterns are remarkably consistent.

Pattern one: the unloved tool. There is always at least one subscription nobody is using. Sometimes it's $40 a month, sometimes it's $400. Usually it was somebody's pet project two roles ago. The owner has been paying it for so long it's become part of the furniture, and nobody has had the bandwidth to actually go cancel it.

Pattern two: the 5-percent tool. There is almost always one expensive enterprise SaaS — Salesforce or HubSpot or a similar platform — being used for about 5% of its capability. The customer pays for the full feature set; uses three things; ignores the other ninety-seven. We don't always recommend replacing these, because the ecosystem and integrations have value, but we always notice.

Pattern three: the redundant pair. Two tools doing roughly the same job. Most often this is two different ticketing systems, or two different scheduling tools, or two different email-marketing platforms. They got purchased at different times for different reasons by different people, and now both are being maintained because nobody wants to migrate.

The aggregate finding across our audits is that the typical small business is paying about 25% more in software subscriptions than they actually need to be — money that's effectively going toward a tax on past decisions. Often the audit alone pays for the engagement. We don't have a sales agenda about that — we just point it out, and you do whatever you want with the information.