Step 1 — Get a full inventory
Pull every SaaS charge from the last 12 months of company credit card statements. Cross-reference with a payments tool like Vendr, Cledara, or just a spreadsheet. Most teams find 10-20% of subscriptions they had forgotten about.
Step 2 — Score each subscription
- Daily active users / total seats — anything under 30% is a candidate
- Last meaningful business use — over 90 days = candidate
- Overlap with another tool you pay for — pick one, cut the other
- Annual contract auto-renewing — flag for negotiation 60 days out
Step 3 — Negotiate or downgrade
Most SaaS vendors will offer 10-25% discount to keep an account at renewal. Email account management, mention you are evaluating alternatives, and ask. Worst case they say no.
Step 4 — Set a quarterly audit cadence
Bloat re-accumulates. A 30-minute quarterly review of new and renewing subscriptions catches it before it becomes a 3-day project.
Common over-spends
- Marketing Hub Pro at HubSpot — most teams use 10% of it
- Salesforce add-ons — half of them duplicate something HubSpot or your data warehouse does
- Multiple analytics tools — pick one product analytics, one site analytics, kill the rest
- Premium tiers of tools where you use one feature
The cultural shift
The real fix is making one person accountable for the SaaS budget. Without an owner, every team adds new subscriptions and nobody removes them.