How to Cut 20–30% of SaaS Spend Without Breaking Anything

SaaS sprawl is the most predictable line-item bloat at growing companies. Every team buys the tool that solves their immediate problem, nobody owns the overall portfolio, and renewal notices arrive faster than anyone can keep up. By the time a CFO asks "what are we spending on SaaS?", the honest answer is usually "more than we think."

The good news: most companies can cut 20–30% of SaaS spend in a single quarter without changing platforms, migrating data, or upsetting any team. Here's the playbook we run.

Step 1: Build the inventory

Pull every recurring software charge from the last 12 months out of your accounting system, your corporate cards, and your reimbursement reports. Add the apps your IdP shows as connected. Deduplicate by vendor.

For each app, capture: vendor, owner (a real person), category, annual cost, contract end date, number of seats licensed, and number of seats actually used in the last 30 days.

That last column is where the money is.

Step 2: Find the obvious wins

Sort the inventory by "licensed but not used in 30 days." You will almost always find:

• Seats assigned to people who left (sometimes years ago).
• Seats provisioned for trials that became permanent.
• Apps where one team uses 12 of the 50 seats the company is paying for.
• Two apps doing the same job because two different teams bought them at different times.

Don't reorganize anything yet. Just downgrade seat counts and deprovision dormant users at the next renewal. Seat reduction alone usually accounts for 10–15% of total spend.

Step 3: Consolidate redundancy

You probably have two project management tools, two design tools, two analytics tools, and two video meeting tools. Pick one of each. The "right" choice is usually whichever one has the most adoption and the lowest switching cost — not the technically superior one.

Give the losing tool a sunset date 60–90 days out. Communicate it once, then enforce it.

Step 4: Renegotiate at renewal

Vendors expect you to renegotiate. The ones who don't get renegotiated are the ones who didn't ask. Three asks that almost always work:

• Multi-year discount in exchange for a longer commit.
• Price hold (no annual increase) in exchange for a case study or reference call.
• True-up flexibility (add seats mid-term at the same per-seat rate, downsize at renewal).

Start the conversation 60 days before renewal, not 7. If the vendor knows you're looking at alternatives, you'll get a better number.

Step 5: Put a process in place so it doesn't come back

The reason SaaS spend creeps back up is that nobody owns it. Fix that with two lightweight controls:

• A single intake process for any new SaaS purchase over a threshold (say, $5K/year). One form, one approver.
• A quarterly review of the inventory — same spreadsheet, refreshed numbers, 30-minute meeting.

What this looks like in practice

A typical 200-person company spending $1.2M/year on SaaS ends a cleanup cycle at $850K–$950K. No migrations. No team disruption. The biggest savings come from seat reduction and consolidation, not from cancelling anything controversial.

The work is mostly bookkeeping. The discipline to actually do it is the rare part.