SaaS sprawl is the silent leak in your IT budget
Every department buys its own tools, licence counts grow with peak headcount but never shrink again, and annual price indexation runs on unnoticed. In practice, comparing actual usage against the contracts almost always uncovers savings — without any loss of performance.
What you get
- Usage analysis — actual usage per licence and service compared against what you're contractually paying for.
- Savings analysis — unnecessary licences, duplicate SaaS and renegotiable rates translated into a concrete savings potential.
- Contract optimisation — renewals used as a negotiating moment: volumes, terms and SLAs tightened up.
Compliance comes with it
Cost optimisation and compliance are two sides of the same analysis: whoever knows what's running also knows where the GDPR, ISO 27001 and DORA risks sit. See also Security, Compliance & Risk.
Want ongoing monitoring instead of a one-off exercise? VendorManager.nl handles that on a subscription basis — including a renewal radar and cost monitoring at every renewal.
How we approach it
A cloud and SaaS optimisation at Digital Sourcing runs in four steps. Each step delivers an interim result you can use even without the next one.
- Inventory — We collect every contract, invoice and licence overview from cloud and SaaS vendors, including subscriptions taken out outside IT (by credit card or per department, for example). The result is a single register listing, per service, the contract value, term, notice period and indexation clause.
- Usage analysis — Per service we compare actual usage with what is contracted: active users versus paid seats, consumed versus reserved capacity, modules in use versus the bundle purchased. Where admin portals give no data, we work with samples and conversations with the service owners.
- Savings scenarios — We calculate the options: scaling down seats, merging overlapping tools, using reserved instances or commitment discounts, and renegotiating rates at the next renewal. Each scenario gets a saving, a risk assessment and an execution date.
- Execution and safeguarding — We conduct the negotiations or support your own team, and record the agreements in a contract calendar so renewals no longer run on unnoticed. See also the contract calendar and the article on SaaS sprawl.
A familiar situation
An organisation with around 400 employees uses three tools for document collaboration, pays for 450 licences of a suite of which 280 are active each month, and has seen the annual price of a core application rise by 28% in three years through an indexation clause that was never challenged. None of these points was on the agenda, because each contract had a different owner. After an inventory and usage analysis, such a situation typically shows that 15 to 25% of annual SaaS spend can be dropped or renegotiated without loss of functionality.
When is this relevant?
- Your SaaS spend is growing faster than your organisation, and nobody can explain why.
- Several major renewals are due within twelve months (Microsoft 365, Salesforce, Atlassian or a cloud ERP, for example).
- Departments take out subscriptions themselves and IT only finds out at invoice time or during a security incident.
- You are preparing a cloud migration and want to know in advance which contracts must come along and which can end.
- An auditor or regulator asks for a complete overview of external processors and cloud vendors.
Frequently asked questions
How much can typically be saved?
That varies by organisation, but comparing actual usage against contracts almost always delivers structural savings in practice — through cancelled licences, cleaned-up SaaS sprawl and renegotiated rates.
Do you have an interest in any particular cloud vendor?
No. Digital Sourcing does not sell software or licences and receives no fees from vendors. The analysis serves your interests only.
What do I need to get started?
Your contracts and invoices, and, where available, usage data from your vendors' admin portals. An initial overview is typically ready within a few weeks.
Do you also work with FinOps tooling?
Yes. Where present, we use the data from your FinOps or SaaS management tooling as a starting point. Tooling is not a prerequisite, however: most savings sit in contracts and usage, not in dashboards. Where tooling is absent, we work with the export options of the vendor portals.
What happens to the licences we clean up?
We scale them down at the next contractual opportunity. Many SaaS contracts do not allow mid-term reductions; in that case we record the date in the contract calendar and prepare the negotiation, so you do not pay for peak numbers again at renewal.
Can this be done for one large contract instead of the whole landscape?
Yes. A targeted analysis of one renewal, such as a Microsoft or ERP contract, is a common starting point. The approach is the same; only the scope is smaller.
Test your sourcing model
Schedule a no-obligation call with Bob Goosen, or start with the free Sourcing Quickscan.
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