Here's a number that should bother you: industry research puts SaaS license waste at around 51%. For Zendesk specifically, one widely cited figure is 45%. If your company has 50 Zendesk agents, something like 20-23 of them probably aren't doing anything useful with their seat.
I know that sounds high. Every time I mention this to a Zendesk admin they say "not us, we're pretty lean." Then we run a scan and find eight agents who haven't logged in since January.
Where the waste comes from
It's almost never one big thing. It's a dozen small things that add up over a year or two.
Someone leaves the company and IT deactivates their email and laptop but forgets about Zendesk. A contractor finishes a three-month project and their agent seat stays active. A manager gets a full agent seat "just in case" even though they only need to read tickets. An entire department gets onboarded during a migration and half of them realize they don't need it, but nobody tells the admin.
The sneaky part is that none of these feel like a problem individually. One extra seat at $89/month is background noise. But twelve extra seats at $89/month is $12,816 per year, and that's how most companies end up overpaying without noticing.
Why Zendesk doesn't help you fix this
Zendesk has no built-in feature that flags inactive agents. There's no dasboard that says "these 15 agents haven't logged in for 60 days." The Admin Center shows you a list of agents, but it doesn't sort or filter by last login. You can see each agent's last activity if you click into their profile one by one, but nobody has time for that with 80 agents.
The Explore reporting tool can theoretically surface some of this data, but only on Professional plans and above, and building the custom report is non-trivial. Most admins I've talked to have never tried.
This isn't an oversight on Zendesk's part, by the way. Every idle seat is revenue for them. Building a "you're overpaying" dashboard is against their financial interest. So they don't.
The suspension trap
A lot of admins think suspending an agent frees their seat. It does not. A suspended agent still counts toward your seat total and you still get billed for them. To actually stop paying, you have to downgrade them to End User.
I've seen companies with 15-20 suspended agents who thought they'd already solved the problem. The bill told a diffrent story.
What this looks like in dollars
A few quick examples based on real conversations I've had (numbers rounded for privacy):
| Company size | Plan | Idle agents | Annual waste |
|---|---|---|---|
| 40 agents | Growth ($89) | 11 | $11,748 |
| 85 agents | Professional ($115) | 23 | $31,740 |
| 200 agents | Enterprise ($169) | 52 | $105,456 |
The Enterprise example included AI and WFM add-ons, which pushed the per-seat cost to $244/month. That's the worst case, but it's also not uncommon at that company size.
How to run your own audit
If you want to do this manually, the process looks like this:
- Pull your full agent list from the Zendesk API (the Admin Center doesn't export login timestamps)
- Check the
last_login_atfield for each agent - Flag anyone who hasn't logged in for 30, 60, or 90+ days
- Check for agents where
last_login_atis null, which means they have literally never logged in - Multiply idle agents by your per-seat cost to get your waste number
- Downgrade idle agents to End User (not suspend)
Set a calendar reminder to repeat this quarterly, because the problem comes back. New hires, role changes, departures. It's a tredmill.
Or skip the manual work and try LicenseTrim. Connect your Zendesk, get results in two minutes, and set up ongoing monitoring so you catch waste as it happens instead of once a quarter when you remember.