If you run operations at a 30-to-50 person company, you probably have a rough idea of your SaaS spend. A list somewhere. Maybe a spreadsheet. Maybe just a mental map of the big ones — Slack, Figma, GitHub, Notion, Zoom.
What you almost certainly don't have is a complete picture. According to Productiv's 2024 SaaS Management Index, the average company of that size pays for 87 distinct SaaS applications. The median ops manager is aware of fewer than 40 of them.
The gap — the 40-plus tools nobody's actively tracking — is where the money leaks.
It rarely starts with bad intentions. An engineer signs up for a $49/month observability tool during an incident. A designer grabs a Figma plugin suite that requires a paid upgrade. Marketing runs a quick test with a $29/month email tool that never gets cancelled after the campaign ends.
Each decision makes sense in isolation. Accumulated over two years of a growing team, they compound into a long tail of forgotten subscriptions, each charging monthly or annually to a company card that doesn't get reconciled at that level of detail.
"We found a Loom Pro plan we'd been paying $240/year for since 2022. Nobody on the team had used it in over a year. The person who signed up had left eight months earlier."
— Head of Ops, 38-person SaaS company
Not all wasted spend looks the same. Knowing which category you're dealing with helps you prioritize what to fix first.
Tools that were useful once, are no longer used, and nobody has thought to cancel. These are the easiest wins: every dollar saved here is pure bottom line. The challenge is finding them. Annual plans are particularly dangerous — a $1,200/year charge hits once, gets forgotten, and auto-renews without scrutiny.
People who left the company — or changed roles — and still hold active seats in tools your team pays for on a per-seat basis. A design tool at $45/seat/month with three ex-employee licenses is $1,620/year in pure waste. This is the category Subrina's ghost seat detection is specifically built to surface.
Paying for a Business plan when your usage fits comfortably in Professional. Or an annual seat count that was set when the team was larger. These require more judgment — the savings depend on whether the higher tier provides any actual value — but they're worth reviewing annually.
The $4,200 figure isn't a round estimate we made up. It's derived from Zylo's SaaS Management Index data combined with Subrina's own early-access user data: average SaaS waste per company employee per year runs approximately $140 across all three waste categories. For a 30-person company, that's $4,200.
That's roughly what a junior ops hire costs per month. Or twelve months of a premium project management tool. Or a meaningful chunk of a paid acquisition budget.
The instinct — once you decide to take this seriously — is to build a spreadsheet. And a spreadsheet is better than nothing. But it has three failure modes that compound over time.
First, it's manual. Someone has to remember to update it every time a new tool gets signed up, a seat count changes, or a subscription is cancelled. In a fast-moving team, that person is usually the ops manager, and it's never the top priority.
Second, it doesn't connect to billing. You can't see the next renewal date unless someone entered it. You can't get an alert when that date is approaching. You find out when the charge hits.
Third, it doesn't connect to HR. When an employee leaves, the spreadsheet doesn't know. The ghost seats accumulate silently. The spreadsheet says 8 Notion seats; the actual usage shows 5 active, 3 belonging to people who left in Q1.
If you want to run a thorough audit without a dedicated tool, here's the approach that works:
Do this once, and you'll typically cut 15–25% of SaaS spend in the first pass. The hard part is keeping it current over the following six months.
A one-time audit is valuable. A maintained register is transformative. The difference is whether you're reacting to waste or preventing it.
Prevention requires two things the spreadsheet approach can't reliably provide: automatic discovery (catching new subscriptions before they go stale) and HR integration (flagging ghost seats as soon as someone leaves, not weeks later).
That's the core reason Subrina exists. Not to replace the discipline of managing SaaS — but to make the maintenance work automatic enough that it actually happens.
Subrina is a SaaS subscription tracker built for 10–100 person businesses. The free plan covers up to 10 subscriptions. Start for free →
The checklist that prevents former employees from retaining tool access weeks after they leave.
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