By Mo Hussein

1 min read

How subscriptions creep up

Nobody decides to spend this much on software. A free trial quietly turns into a paid plan. Each team picks its own tool. Per-user pricing grows with every new starter, and annual renewals arrive when nobody's looking. A few years later there are a dozen logins and no clear owner for any of them.

Run the audit in an afternoon

  • Export the last twelve months of card and bank transactions.
  • Pull out every software line and note the name, monthly cost, number of seats and renewal date.
  • Give each one an owner: the person who'd notice if it disappeared.
  • Check who actually uses it. Most admin panels show when each person last logged in.
  • Mark each tool keep, cut or merge.

Overlaps worth looking for

The usual suspects are two or three tools that each hold a copy of your customer list, two places to store files, and a project tool that everyone ignores in favour of a shared spreadsheet. Every duplicate is a cost, and it's also a place where information goes out of date.

When building beats renting

Sometimes the audit points to something we'd build. That's usually when you pay per seat for lots of people who only need one screen, or when staff spend their day copying between three tools that don't talk to each other.

Often it points the other way. If a mainstream product does nearly everything you need, keep it, and maybe connect it to your other systems properly. That's cheaper than replacing it.

Bring the list

If you do the audit, bring the list to a discovery call. It makes for a very specific twenty minutes, and you'll leave knowing what to cut, what to keep and whether anything is worth building.