Take a look at that company credit card statement. Go ahead and count the software charges – I’ll bet you’re shocked at how many there are.
That mounting pile of bills is the reason a lot of companies are cutting back on SaaS budgets right now.
No grand, high-level strategy or anything like that it just happened because someone finally decided to tally up all the invoices and saw that different teams were using all sorts of overlapping tools that all had their own login and monthly charge.
How The Bill Got so Out of Hand
It just sort of snowballs. One team buys a scheduling app, another team uses a different scheduler, and before you know it finance has snapped up a tool to keep track of all the other tools, and nobody ever bothers to cancel anything because it seems like too much of a hassle – and so the charges just keep piling up, year after year, for the most part unnoticed.
The Impact of AI
But then AI came along and changed the whole dynamic. A lot of those little point tools were essentially just automated tricks with a fancy logo you could use them to do a specific job, but you still had to string together a bunch of different apps to get the job done. Now you can just wire up one model, feed it your data, and let it handle all that tedious routing that used to need three separate apps.
That’s what’s really driving companies to cut back on SaaS budgets not just trimming the fat, but actually replacing some of that software with more streamlined options.
It’s a pretty straightforward process. Just pull up that credit card statement, list out every recurring charge, and then ask yourself who actually used each one in the past month. If nobody remembers?
You’d be amazed at how much software is just sitting there quietly racking up charges that nobody even remembers they’re paying for.
That’s usually where cutting SaaS budgets starts just going through the list and cutting out anything that’s no longer useful.
