A typical 30-person company will have between 25 and 40 active SaaS subscriptions. Nobody planned to end up with three task management tools and two CRMs running in parallel. It just happened. Marketing bought Asana, production picked Trello, the board settled on ClickUp — and each department was convinced that "at least we've got our stuff in order".
This post isn't about SaaS being bad. It's about how to clean up SaaS sprawl in a small company without breaking the way people who got used to their tools actually work.
Where the SaaS mess comes from
The business model of most SaaS applications is deliberately designed so you start quickly and pay a lot. Sign up with a credit card, two-week trial, then 15-30 euro per user per month. Nobody asks about a master agreement, nobody runs a needs analysis, nobody checks whether the company already has something similar. A department picks it, uses it, and pays for it out of its own budget.
After two years you end up with something like this. At one of our clients — a 45-person marketing agency — we found 34 active SaaS subscriptions. Three different task management tools (Trello, Asana, ClickUp), two CRMs (HubSpot and Pipedrive), four video conferencing tools (Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, Zoom, Whereby), five different file-sharing systems. Total subscription cost: PLN 8,400 per month. After consolidation we brought it down to 12 active tools and PLN 3,100 per month — PLN 63,000 in annual savings, without firing anyone and without taking away from any department what they actually needed.
The mess comes from three things: ease of purchase (credit card plus a nod from the department head), lack of visibility (no single system sees all subscriptions at once), and inertia (once you've been paying for two years, it's hard to admit the tool isn't being used).
Do an inventory — not the one you're thinking of
The classic "SaaS inventory" is a spreadsheet where IT writes down everything they remember. It ends at 8-10 items — the "official" IT only. The rest stays in the shadows.
A real inventory works from the direction of money and authentication, not memory:
- Company card statements for the last 12 months. Every SaaS subscription shows up as a recurring EUR/USD payment with the vendor name in the description. That's usually 60-80% of the list.
- Sign-in logs from Google Workspace or Microsoft 365. Who signed in where via "Sign in with Google" in the last 90 days. This catches free personal accounts that people use for work purposes — and which never appear on company cards.
- A one-question employee survey. "List every web tool you use for work at least once a week." Not "every tool", just "regular ones". Without this thread you'll miss about 20% of the list.
- Accounting invoices — filter by foreign suppliers. Most SaaS vendors are foreign entities, so filtering invoices under the reverse-charge VAT catches the rest.
Goal: end up with one list with these columns — name, vendor, monthly cost, number of paid seats, number of actively used seats (last 30 days), business owner, renewal date. That list is the foundation of everything downstream.
Overlapping features — how to pick the one
Once you see the list, the duplicates will surprise you. Three video conferencing suites, two note-taking tools, four different places where people store files. The classic instinct is to call a meeting to "decide which one we use" — and get stuck in departmental politics.
Better approach: decide yourself based on data, then consult. The choice usually makes itself after two questions:
- Which of the overlapping products has the most active users today? (Not "licences", but people actually signing in during the last 30 days.)
- Which of them is most deeply integrated with your other key systems — ERP, calendar, customer records?
If those two questions point to the same application — the decision is made, the consultation is a formality. If they point in different directions — you have to choose between "less migration" and "better architecture". Integration usually wins, because the cost of re-integrating with the ERP is higher than the cost of training 10 people on a new task tool.
Migration without a civil war
SaaS consolidation is always political. People get attached to tools where they've stored a year's worth of work. Downplaying that ends in quiet sabotage — the department will officially use the "common" tool but keep running its actual projects in the old one.
Four rules that in our experience actually work:
- Say exactly when the old application will go away. "Within 6 months" is too vague. "31 December at midnight we shut Trello down; access disappears after that date" — this works. A hard deadline forces migration.
- Arrange an export of the history, not just access to the new app. People want to know that a year of their work won't vanish. Even if they'll never look at it again — it has to be physically preserved, e.g. on a network drive as CSV or PDF.
- Don't migrate everyone at once. Start with the department least attached to the old tool. After a successful 4-week migration, the rest sees it works and stops protesting.
- Leave a transition window. A month where both tools run in parallel costs less than a civil war. After that month, cut hard — otherwise people will use both forever.
Cancel accounts, not just subscriptions
This is the part most often forgotten. Cancelling a subscription is one thing. Cleaning up accounts of former employees and departments that stopped using the tool is another — and this is a security piece, not just cost savings.
We typically see this situation: the company is paying for 50 seats in a tool, and 22 people are actively signing in. The rest are accounts of former employees, test accounts created "for a moment" three years ago, external contractor accounts long past project end. Each is a potential entry point — and a cost on top.
You do it like this: for every active subscription, pull the user list with last sign-in dates. Anything over 90 days without a sign-in goes to deactivation. Over 180 days — deletion. Annual seat reduction is usually 30-40% for team tools. In the agency mentioned above, this one operation saved PLN 1,200 per month before we even started consolidating duplicates.
What next
SaaS consolidation isn't a one-off project — it's a habit. Once a quarter someone in the company should walk through the subscription list and check three things: are there new items, is any of them unused, does any of them overlap with something you already have.
Three starting questions, without needing a full audit:
- How many SaaS subscriptions do you actually have in the company (not in IT's memory, but on card statements for the last 12 months)?
- What percentage of the seats you're paying for is actively used in the last 30 days?
- Do any two of your tools solve the same problem for two different departments?
If you don't know the answer to at least one of these — don't panic, treat it as a signal that an inventory is worth doing. If you don't know where to start, we help SMEs break down SaaS sprawl into its parts on a regular basis. The first call is free and takes half an hour.
You don't need to buy another tool to get your company in order. Usually it's enough to decide which of the ten you're already paying for you're actually using.