It's over
by•
Ran the numbers on vendor/software spend at a few companies out of curiosity and honestly wasn't ready for it.
Duplicate tools solving the same problem, licenses paid for months after nobody was using them, contracts that quietly auto-renewed because no one was watching!!.
Has anyone else actually audited this at their own company?
Curious if what I'm seeing is normal or if we just got unusually messy.
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What surprised you the most during the audit duplicte tools, unused licenses, or the auto renewing contracts?
@kathrine_rolce
Honestly, unused licenses surprised me the most. I expected duplicate tools to be the big one, but seeing a company paying full price for 200 seats on a platform with like 3 people actually logging in was wild nobody had looked at that in months. Auto-renewals are sneaky too, but at least those are a one-time "oops." The unused licenses just quietly bleed money every single month and nobody notices until someone actually goes looking.
I don't think it's unusual at all. Software stacks tend to grow little by little, and before anyone notices, there are three tools
doing almost same job.
@edward_paul3
That's a fair point, and honestly a better way to put it than "surprising." It's less a single bad decision and more death by a thousand small ones someone signs up for a tool to solve one problem, another team does the same thing six months later, and nobody's cross-checking. By the time anyone looks, there are three tools doing basically the same job and no one remembers why. That gradual creep is exactly why it's so easy to miss without someone deliberately auditing for it.
This is more common than most teams realize. A simple fix is to give every tool one clear owner, review actual usage before each renewal, and keep renewal dates in one shared place with alerts 30–60 days ahead. I’d also audit by workflow rather than vendor name — that’s usually how you discover three different teams paying for tools that solve almost the same problem.
@jithu3 That sounds useful. The real value will probably be not only finding every tool, but showing who owns it, whether it’s actually being used, when it renews, and where the overlap is. Curious to see how you’re approaching that.
@alpertayfurr
Yeah, that's where the real value ended up being for me too. Finding the tools was the easy part cross-referencing spend against usage data to catch overlap was the harder, more useful bit. Ownership was the trickiest piece since most companies don't track "who signed up" cleanly, but we found a way around it cross-referencing SSO logs and expense/card data usually surfaces the real owner, and anything left unresolved just gets flagged for a department head to claim. Renewal dates were the easy part once contracts are in one place.