How do you track your SaaS expenses?
Mehdi Rifai
5 replies
We all use many SaaS products in our start ups, but how do you keep track of:
- how much you get billed monthly?
- how much you will get billed next month?
- the number of seats used on the SaaS?
Replies
Upen V@upen946
I have been spending good money on a few tools like Circle, TweetHunter, Render etc for my products https://microsaashq.com, https://siteoly.com
Frankly, I don't track the expenses but if you are talking more from B2B orgs, there is this new startup cloudeagle.ai that solves this problem for organizations at scale.
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@upen946 really appreciate your feedback. I was indeed thinking of a tool like cloudeagle. i find it quite expensive to be honest. Plans start at $500 it's more expensive than any solopreneur or saas early stage start ups use. As far as we are concerned, our saas bill is between $2000 and $3000 but sometimes i feel i can cut $400-500 easy if I had a clear view of my expenses.
Btw I read your substack regularly great stuff there!
@mehdi_rifai Thanks Mehdi. Then probably you could build one for Solopreneur or SaaS early stage start ups but the only problem is they won't pay recurring once they think they are in control. If you are solving the same problem, why not solve the same for B2B and charge more. By the way, I don't think $500/m is big for companies that want to save $100K or more year.
Vendor Management as a Service (VMaaS) is an intriguing industry which has popped up like crazy over the past few years. Tropic and Vendr and two of the biggest names in this space.
VMaaS vendors provide companies with a solution to manage their software contracts and negotiate discounts on the companies behalf. These companies typically begin their engagement by requesting a listing of a business's SaaS spend by vendor over the past 6 to 12 months. They then perform a savings analysis and present the business with an estimate of how much they can save in the next 12 months.
VMaaS vendors also offer a software platform that stores SaaS vendor contracts, integrates with a business's single sign-on (SSO) to track seat usage, and notifies relevant stakeholders of upcoming renewals in advance.
If you are spending more than $50k per year on SaaS software (and are asking yourself this question), utilizing one of these VMaaS vendors is definitely something worth exploring.