Licensing

You are paying for people who left, and tools you bought twice.

An audit of every SaaS subscription and licence tier against who actually signs in. No benchmark data needed — the evidence is in your own identity provider and admin consoles.

FeeFixed, quoted per scope Duration10 business days InputUsage & billing exports Typical scope15–60 tools

Scope

What gets examined

Every finding here is provable from your own systems, which means nobody can argue with it in the review meeting.

Inactive and dormant seats — last sign-in per user per tool, from your identity provider rather than the vendor's own reporting
Leavers still licensed, and the offboarding gap that keeps recreating the problem
Duplicate and overlapping tools: three project trackers, two e-signature vendors, four places people store files
Tier over-provisioning — Enterprise plans bought for one feature that a cheaper tier also has
Microsoft 365 and Entra licence mix, including E5 assigned to people using E3 features
Auto-renewal and notice-period dates, mapped to a calendar so you stop missing the window
Shelfware: anything bought in a burst of enthusiasm and never rolled out
Per-seat contracts sized to headcount forecasts that didn't happen

Deliverable

What you get on day fourteen

A licence register listing every tool, its cost, its contract end date, its notice period, and its real active-user count — often the first time anyone has seen all of it on one page.

A ranked reduction list split into three buckets: cancel now, downgrade at renewal, and consolidate into something you already pay for. Each with a dollar figure and the internal conversation it requires.

A renewal calendar so the next twelve months of decisions arrive with notice instead of as an invoice.

Where a saving needs a negotiation rather than a configuration change, we'll say so plainly — that's a procurement job, not an engineering one.

Fit

When this is worth it

Worth it if you have more than about 40 staff, more than 15 SaaS tools, and no single person who can tell you what you spend on software each month. Growth by acquisition makes it worth it at any size.

Not worth it if procurement already runs a licence register with usage data attached. In that case you don't need us; you need someone to act on what it already says.

Questions

The ones we get asked first

Do you need admin access to every tool?

Read-only or reporting access, ideally via your identity provider so we can see sign-in activity centrally. For tools outside SSO, an exported user list with last-login dates is enough.

Won't the vendors tell us this for free?

They'll tell you your seat count. They have no incentive to tell you that 40% of those seats haven't logged in this quarter, or that a cheaper tier covers what you use.

Is this just a cancellation exercise?

No — a good chunk of findings are consolidation, where something you already pay for replaces something you also pay for. Those are usually the bigger and less painful savings.

Can you negotiate the renewals for us?

No, and we'd be pretending if we claimed to. We don't hold benchmark pricing data. We'll give you the usage evidence that makes your own negotiation much stronger, and we're happy to be on the call as the technical voice.

Also available

The other audits

Cloud infrastructureCommitments, idle resources, storage and network Data platformsWarehouse sizing, query cost, retention ObservabilityMetric cardinality, log volume, retention Contracts & vendorsRenewal exposure, licensing position, evidence Essential EightScored maturity assessment and costed roadmap

Next step

How many tools are you paying for?

If the answer is "We'd have to check with finance," that's usually the answer that makes this worthwhile.

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