We surveyed 400 finance leaders at companies with 10–200 employees. The median company had 34 active SaaS subscriptions. The median finance team could name 21 of them. The gap, 13 subscriptions nobody could account for, averaged $1,100 per month.
The Anatomy of Sprawl
Subscription sprawl doesn't happen because people are careless. It happens because buying SaaS is easy and visibility is fragmented. A developer signs up for a CI tool. A marketer starts a Loom trial that auto-converts. A designer adds a Figma seat. Each decision was reasonable. The aggregate is invisible.
The Four-Step Audit
- Pull every recurring charge from your business cards for the past 90 days
- Map each charge to a named owner and a team, unowned tools get cancelled
- Score each tool by last login date and daily active users
- Consolidate overlapping tools (you probably have three project management apps)
Prevention Is Cheaper Than Cure
Once you've done the audit, the goal is never needing to do it again. That means requiring purchase approval for any new subscription above a threshold, and routing all software billing through a single card or account that feeds into a monitoring tool.
The companies that do this best treat software subscriptions the same way they treat headcount: every seat needs a business case and a renewal decision.
Ndifoin Hilary
Founder