AI
Your SaaS Bill Is Lying to You (Here's How to Audit It)
Andreas Melvær
•
6 min read
Mar 2, 2026
SmplCo's managing partner Andreas Melvær has spent the last decade building, buying, and killing software products. Here he explains why most companies are haemorrhaging money on SaaS they barely use — and what to do about it.
Your SaaS Bill Is Lying to You
Most companies are paying for software they barely use. Not in the "we forgot to cancel a trial" sense — though that happens too. We mean the tools your team logs into every day. The ones you'd swear you need.
Here's the reality: according to Zylo's 2025 SaaS Management Index, 35–50% of all SaaS licenses go unused for 90 days or more. The average company now spends $4,830 per employee on SaaS — and for enterprises with over 1,000 employees, total annual SaaS spend averages in the tens of millions. Enterprises at that scale waste an estimated $21 million per year on unused licenses alone.
That's not a rounding error. That's a budget line hiding in plain sight.
The SaaS Bloat Problem
A company with around 1,000 employees typically runs 100–200 SaaS applications. Larger enterprises — 10,000+ employees — average 447 apps and spend upwards of $284 million annually on SaaS. And 7 in 10 organisations report significant tool overlap across their stack.
Every growing company accumulates SaaS subscriptions the way a kitchen drawer accumulates junk. A project management tool here. A reporting dashboard there. A CRM with 200 features when you use 12.
Each tool made sense at the time. But over the years, the stack compounds. And because most SaaS products are priced for their full feature set — not the fraction you actually touch — you end up paying enterprise prices for basic needs.
At SmplCo, when we audit our clients' tech stacks, the pattern is almost always the same:
3–5 overlapping tools doing variations of the same thing
Premium tiers nobody asked for, auto-renewed from a decision made two years ago
Entire platforms kept alive because one team uses one feature
Shadow IT making up 30–40% of all SaaS spend — tools that IT doesn't even know about
Research from Gartner suggests organisations overspend by 25–30% annually on underutilised software. For a 1,000-person company spending $5 million a year on SaaS, that's $1.25–$1.5 million being wasted. Every year.
Why Now? Because Building Got Cheap
A year ago, replacing a SaaS tool meant hiring a developer, writing a spec, and waiting months. The economics rarely made sense for a small internal tool.
That equation has flipped.
Tools like Claude Code, combined with integrations like Figma MCP, mean you can go from "we need a simple dashboard that does X" to a working, deployed tool in hours — not months. The cost of building a lightweight, fit-for-purpose tool has dropped by an order of magnitude.
"The thing that's changed isn't just the tools — it's the mindset. Companies used to accept that custom software was expensive and slow. Now you can build something genuinely useful in days. That shift hasn't fully sunk in yet for most organisations, and that's the opportunity." — Andreas Melvær
This isn't about replacing Salesforce with a weekend project. It's about identifying the 15 small-to-medium tools in your stack where you're paying £200–£2,000/month each for something that could be a simple, tailored app that does exactly what your team needs. Nothing more, nothing less.
How to Run a SaaS Audit
The process isn't complicated. It just takes honesty.
1. List Everything You're Paying For
Pull your company card statements. Check your Google Workspace or Microsoft admin panel for connected apps. Ask each team lead what tools their team uses daily.
You will find subscriptions you forgot existed. Everyone does. Research shows that over half of SaaS applications in the average enterprise are unsanctioned — purchased by individual teams without IT's knowledge. That's your starting point.
2. Map Usage to Cost
For each tool, answer three questions:
What features does your team actually use? Not "what could they use" — what do they use this week?
What percentage of the tool's capability does that represent? Be brutal.
What are you paying per month?
When you see a £500/month tool and realise your team uses it as a glorified spreadsheet, the conversation changes.
3. Identify the Replaceable
Not everything should be replaced. Your core CRM, your accounting software, your communication tools — those usually earn their keep. The targets are:
Single-purpose tools with high price tags (reporting dashboards, form builders, simple internal apps)
Tools where you're paying for seats you don't use
Anything your team has built workarounds for — if people are exporting data to a spreadsheet to do the actual work, the tool isn't working
4. Build Small, Save Big
This is where it gets interesting. For each replaceable tool, consider: could a simple custom app do this job?
"The question I always ask clients is: if this tool disappeared tomorrow, what would you actually miss? Usually it's about three features out of fifty. That's your spec for a replacement." — Andreas Melvær
With AI-assisted development, a tailored mini-tool that handles your exact workflow costs a fraction of building traditional software. At SmplCo, we build these kinds of purpose-built tools for clients regularly — a dashboard that shows exactly the metrics you care about, a form that feeds directly into your pipeline, an internal tool that automates the three manual steps your team repeats fifty times a week.
No feature bloat. No per-seat pricing. No paying for someone else's roadmap.
The ROI Is Immediate
Let's make the maths concrete. A 1,000-employee company spending roughly $5 million annually on SaaS — close to the industry average — is likely wasting $1.25–$1.5 million of that based on typical utilisation rates. Even capturing a fraction of that waste translates to hundreds of thousands in annual savings.
Say you identify five SaaS tools costing a combined £3,000/month where custom alternatives would serve you better. Building lightweight replacements might cost a few thousand once. You break even in a month or two, and then you're saving £36,000 a year — with tools that actually fit your workflow.
And here's the part people don't expect: the custom tools are often better. Not because they do more, but because they do exactly what you need and nothing else. Less training. Less confusion. Less time navigating features that aren't relevant to your business.
Start With an Audit, Not a Rebuild
We're not suggesting you cancel everything and start from scratch. Start with visibility. Know what you're paying for. Know what you're actually using. The gap between those two numbers is your opportunity.
"The biggest barrier to saving money on SaaS isn't technology — it's visibility. Most companies simply don't know what they're paying for, let alone what they're actually using. Once you see it clearly, the decisions become obvious." — Andreas Melvær
If you want help running a SaaS audit or building lightweight tools to replace the bloat, that's exactly the kind of thing we do. Get in touch and we'll help you figure out where the savings are.
