A few years ago, getting new software meant a procurement process, an IT ticket, and a three-month implementation. Now anyone with a company credit card can sign up for a SaaS tool in five minutes. That's great for productivity. It's terrible for cost control.
According to recent market research, the average mid-size company uses between 100 and 200 SaaS applications. Most IT departments can only account for about half of them.
How sprawl happens
It's never one big purchase. It's dozens of small ones.
Marketing signs up for a new email automation tool because the old one is clunky. Sales adds a prospecting tool that overlaps with an existing CRM feature. The support team is on Zendesk, but someone in engineering also set up a Slack channel for customer issues. Finance is using Expensify for expense reports while another team submits expenses through a different tool.
Each of these decisions makes sense individually. Nobody is being irresponsible. But the cumulative effect is a stack of overlapping tools where nobody has a complete picture of what's being paid for.
The cost is worse than you think
The obvious cost is duplicate subscriptions. Two project management tools, three file sharing services, multiple communication platforms. But the bigger cost is usually idle seats within the tools you do need.
Zendesk is a good example. A company with 80 agent seats typically has 15-25 agents who haven't logged in for months. At $115/month per seat on Suite Professional, that's $20,000-$34,000 per year in waste on a single tool. Scale that across every per-seat SaaS product and you're looking at serious money.
Tools like BetterCloud exist to give IT visibility across the entire SaaS stack. They're good but they're enterprise-priced ($50K+/year), which puts them out of reach for most mid-market companies. If your biggest pain point is a specific tool like Zendesk, a focused solution is usually more practical.
The shadow IT problem
The tools IT doesn't know about are called shadow IT, and they're a security concern on top of a cost concern. An unsanctioned tool with company data in it doesn't go through security review, doesn't get included in access audits, and doesn't get decomissioned when employees leave.
This isn't about blaming employees for signing up for tools. It's about the gap between how easy it is to start paying for software and how hard it is to know what you're paying for across the organization.
What to do about it
Start with the tools you know about and that have the highest per-seat costs. For most support teams, that's Zendesk. Run an audit of active vs. inactive agents. Downgrade anyone who isn't logging in. Convert ticket-viewers to light agents (they're free).
Then work outward. Check your company credit card statements for recurring SaaS charges. Ask department heads what tools their teams use. You'll find overlap, and you'll find subscriptions nobody remembers signing up for.
For the Zendesk piece specifically, LicenseTrim does the agent audit automatically. Connect your account, see who's active and who's dead weight, and get monthly reports so the waste doesn't pile up again. It's a smaller problem to solve than the entire SaaS stack, but it's usually the most expensive one.