The duplication problem nobody talks about
Every company I've worked with has at least one pair of cloud tools that do basically the same thing. Usually more than one pair. It's not that anyone made a bad decision. It's that different teams bought different tools at different times, and nobody noticed the overlap until the bills started adding up.
According to Grand View Research's analysis of the software asset management market, organizations are spending more on SaaS than ever. And a meaningful chunk of that spending is pure duplication.
How duplicates happen
The story usually goes like this. A team has a problem. They find a cloud tool that solves it. They sign up, maybe on a free trial, and start using it. It works well, so they convert to a paid plan. Nobody checks whether another team already pays for something similar.
This is especially common with customer support and CRM tools. I've seen companies running Zendesk for their support team while sales uses a completely separate ticketing system. Both tools handle customer communication. Both store customer data. Both charge per seat. The overlap is obvious from the outside but invisible from within each team.
The same thing happens with productivity suites. One department runs on Microsoft 365 while another uses Google Workspace. Both provide email, document editing, and file storage. Paying for both means you're essentially buying the same capabilities twice.
Research and Markets' report on cloud digital asset management found that the average mid-size company has between 15% and 25% redundancy in their SaaS stack. That's not a rounding error. For a company spending $200,000 a year on cloud tools, that's $30,000 to $50,000 in pure waste.
The sneaky ones
Some duplicates are obvious. Two project management tools, two CRM platforms, two chat applications. Those are easy to spot if you bother looking.
The sneaky duplicates are partial overlaps. This is where things get interesting.
Take Salesforce as an example. It's a CRM, sure. But it also has built-in reporting, workflow automation, and even basic customer support features. If your sales team uses Salesforce for CRM and your support team uses Zendesk for ticketing, you might actually be paying for overlapping features in both platforms. The reporting capabilities in each tool cover similar ground. The customer data lives in two places.
I'm not saying you should rip out one or the other. Both Salesforce and Zendesk are excellent at what they do best. But you should know where the overlap exists and whether you're paying for features you could consolidate.
Another common one is communication tools. A company might pay for Slack, Microsoft Teams (bundled with their 365 subscription), and a separate video conferencing tool. Three products, all handling messaging and video calls. The total cost isn't just the subscriptions either. There's the hidden cost of context switching, of not knowing which tool has teh conversation you need, of maintaining integrations across all of them.
How to find your duplicates
Start with a brutally honest inventory. List every cloud tool your company pays for. Every single one. Include the ones on someone's corporate credit card that never went through procurement. Include the free tiers that quietly converted to paid plans.
Now categorize them by function. Not by team, by function. Group everything that handles "customer communication" together. Group everything that handles "project management" together. Group everything that handles "file storage" together.
You'll see the duplicates immediately.
For each duplicate pair, figure out what each tool does that the other doesn't. Sometimes there's a genuine reason for both. A support team might need Zendesk's ticket routing and SLA tracking features that a generic CRM simply can't match. That's a valid justification. But "we've always used this one" is not.
The consolidation conversation
Once you've identified duplicates, the hard part begins. Telling a team that their favorite tool is going away is never fun. People get attached to their workflows. They've built processes around specific features. Change feels risky.
Here's what I've learned works. Don't frame it as taking something away. Frame it as asking a question. "We're paying for two tools that overlap significantly. Can we pilot using just one for the next quarter and see how it goes?"
A pilot removes the permanence. People are more willing to try something when they know they can go back. And in practice, most pilots succeed becuase the second tool turns out to be less essential than everyone thought.
Be honest about the cost too. When you tell a team lead "we're spending $15,000 a year on a tool that 60% of your team never logs into," that changes the conversation. Nobody wants to be responsible for waste, especially not visible, quantified waste.
Prevention is cheaper than cleanup
Once you've cleaned up the duplicates, put guardrails in place so they don't come back.
The simplest guardrail is a purchasing checklist. Before any team buys a new cloud tool, they answer one question: does any other team already pay for a tool that does this? If yes, can we add seats to that existing tool instead? This alone prevents most future duplication.
A monthly SaaS review helps too. Not a massive audit, just a quick scan of new subscriptions and a comparison against what you already have. Catch duplicates at 30 days and you save eleven months of waste. Catch them at 12 months and you've already burned the money.
We built LicenseTrim partly because this problem is so pervasive. It's not just about unused seats, though that's a big piece of it. It's about making the full picture visible so you can make informed decisions about where your software budget actually goes.
Look at your SaaS stack this week. I'd bet real money you're paying for someting twice.