SaaS is easy to buy and easy to forget. Teams sign up for tools, usage drops, but the licences keep renewing. The result is sprawl: overlapping tools, unused accounts and costs that steadily rise without anyone looking at them any more.
How SaaS sprawl arises unnoticed
SaaS often bypasses the classic procurement process. A team lead sets up a tool with a credit card, others follow, and within a year three solutions are running for the same problem. Because the amounts look small individually, it goes unnoticed — until you add them up.
On top of that comes the silent price rise: at renewal, rates go up, ‘AI features’ are added at a premium, and the number of paid accounts grows faster than the number of active users.
What a usage analysis reveals
The key is to put actual usage next to the contracts. Who still logs in? How many accounts are there, and how many are really used? Which tools overlap? Almost always, unused licences, duplicate functionality and over-provisioning surface here.
In practice, cleaning that up yields 10–15% on licence and contract costs — money you don't save once, but keep every year.
From one-off clean-up to structural management
A clean-up works, but without management it stacks up again within a year. So set out who may buy new SaaS, link each tool to an owner, and re-check at every renewal whether usage and price still match.
That way cost control becomes not a project but a routine — and the saving is retained.
What you'd do now
Request the actual usage per SaaS tool and put it next to the contract data and costs.
Cancel or downgrade what nobody uses, consolidate overlapping tools and renegotiate at the next renewal. Then assign ownership so the sprawl doesn't return.
This article provides general information and is not legal or financial advice. Want to apply it to your own situation? Get in touch.