Pull up your company’s credit card statement and count the recurring software charges. Go on, I’ll wait. If you’re anything like the businesses I talk to, the number will surprise you. It always does.

The average mid-sized company now manages between 110 and 200 SaaS subscriptions, according to Productiv’s 2024 State of SaaS report. Not 20. Not 50. Over a hundred. And roughly 30% of those licences go unused in any given month. That’s money leaving your bank account every month for software nobody opens.

Welcome to subscription fatigue. It’s one of the most overlooked cost problems in modern business.

How We Got Here

The shift from one-time software purchases to subscriptions was supposed to be a good thing. Lower upfront costs. Automatic updates. The ability to scale up or down as needed. And for individual tools, it is a good model.

The problem is multiplication. Every department has its own preferred tools. Marketing runs HubSpot, Canva Pro, Hootsuite, SEMrush, and Mailchimp. Sales has Salesforce, Gong, Outreach, and ZoomInfo. Engineering uses GitHub, Jira, Datadog, and AWS. HR has BambooHR, Culture Amp, and LinkedIn Recruiter.

Each subscription seems reasonable in isolation. $20 per user here, $50 per user there. But when you add them all up across every department, the total is staggering. A company with 100 employees easily spends $500,000 to $1.5 million annually on SaaS subscriptions. And that’s before the enterprise contracts for major platforms like Salesforce or SAP.

The Waste Is Systemic

The waste happens at multiple levels. There are outright unused licences — seats purchased for employees who’ve left or changed roles. There are underused licences — people who log in once a month to check one report that could be delivered by email. And there are overlapping tools — three different project management platforms because different teams made different choices at different times.

A Sydney financial services firm I spoke with discovered they were paying for four separate video conferencing tools. Teams, Zoom, Google Meet, and Webex — each adopted by a different business unit at different points. Nobody had a complete picture of the total spend.

This isn’t negligence. It’s a natural consequence of decentralised purchasing. When every manager can sign up for a SaaS tool with a corporate credit card, nobody tracks the aggregate. Individual expenses look modest. The collective bill is enormous.

Why It’s Hard to Fix

You’d think the solution is simple: audit your subscriptions and cancel what you don’t need. In theory, yes. In practice, it’s remarkably difficult.

First, there’s the discovery problem. Many subscriptions are buried in expense reports, purchased on departmental cards, or bought through personal accounts and expensed. Getting a complete inventory requires digging through multiple systems and talking to dozens of people.

Second, there’s the political problem. Try cancelling a team’s preferred tool and watch the pushback. “We need Asana for client projects.” “We can’t switch from Slack to Teams, it’ll disrupt our workflow.” Every tool has advocates who’ll fight to keep it, regardless of whether the company needs three tools that do the same thing.

Third, there’s the contract problem. Many SaaS agreements lock you into annual terms with auto-renewal clauses. Miss the cancellation window by a day, and you’re on the hook for another year. Vendors design it this way deliberately.

What Smart Companies Are Doing

The firms getting this under control are taking a few practical steps.

Centralised SaaS management. Tools like Zylo and Torii give IT teams visibility into every subscription across the organisation, including those purchased on personal cards or through app stores. You can’t manage what you can’t see.

Regular access reviews. Quarterly reviews of who’s actually using what. Not just whether they’ve logged in, but whether they’re using the tool in a meaningful way. A licence that generates two logins a month might not be worth renewing.

Approved tool catalogues. Rather than letting every team choose their own tools, forward-thinking companies maintain a list of approved platforms for each category. Need project management? Here are the two options we support. Need design tools? Here’s what we’ve standardised on. This doesn’t prevent all sprawl, but it slows it considerably.

Consolidation where possible. The major platforms — Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Salesforce — have been aggressively expanding their feature sets. Many of the niche tools companies pay for separately are now available within platforms they already have. It’s worth checking whether your existing subscriptions cover capabilities you’re paying for twice.

The Bigger Question

Subscription fatigue points to a broader issue with how businesses adopt technology. There’s a bias toward adding new tools and a reluctance to retire old ones. It feels productive to sign up for a new platform. It feels risky to cancel one.

But every tool has costs beyond its subscription fee. There’s the time to learn it, maintain it, integrate it, and support it. There’s the cognitive overhead of switching between too many applications. There’s the data fragmentation that comes from spreading information across dozens of systems.

Sometimes the most productive thing you can do is subtract. Cancel the tools nobody uses. Consolidate where functions overlap. Simplify the stack.

Your finance team will thank you. And honestly, your employees probably will too. Nobody actually enjoys having 14 different apps pinned to their taskbar.