Our monthly SaaS bill hit $4,200. For a 9-person startup.

That’s when we did the audit nobody wants to do: logging into every tool, checking who actually used it, and asking hard questions about whether we needed it.

Three months later, we’re at $1,800. Lost nothing important. Here’s how.

The Audit Process

First, list everything. We found 11 paid tools:

1. Slack (communication)
2. Notion (documentation)
3. Asana (project management)
4. Figma (design)
5. HubSpot (CRM)
6. Intercom (customer support)
7. Mailchimp (email marketing)
8. Calendly (scheduling)
9. Loom (video messaging)
10. Miro (whiteboarding)
11. Airtable (various databases)

Then we pulled usage data. Slack showed logins but not engagement. Intercom provided actual ticket counts. Some tools required manual checking—who logged in last month?

What We Learned

Three tools were barely used: Miro (2 logins in 60 days), Calendly (founder only), Loom (nobody).

Two tools duplicated functions: Both Notion and Airtable were being used as databases. Neither team knew about the other.

One tool was wildly overprovisioned: HubSpot’s enterprise tier for a team that used maybe 20% of features.

The Consolidation

Kept (with downgrades)

Slack — Communication hub. No alternative makes sense. But we dropped from Plus to free tier. Lost: guest access, longer message history. Acceptable trade-offs.

Notion — Became our everything tool: docs, wikis, project tracking, simple databases. Replaced Asana for project management. Steeper learning curve for complex projects, but eliminated a $300/month subscription.

Figma — Design is core to our product. Non-negotiable. But we reduced seats from 6 to 3. Designers collaborate; not everyone needs edit access.

HubSpot — Downgraded from Enterprise to Starter. Lost: advanced automation, custom reporting. Kept: contact management, basic pipeline. The features we lost, we’d never configured anyway.

Eliminated

Asana — Notion handles our project complexity. We’re not running construction sites. Kanban boards and task lists suffice.

Mailchimp — HubSpot’s email tools cover our needs. One less integration to maintain.

Calendly — Cal.com’s free tier does everything we need. Scheduling isn’t a competitive advantage.

Loom — Screen recording built into Slack, Notion, and macOS. Dedicated tool unnecessary.

Miro — Figma’s FigJam does whiteboarding. Another tool we bought for one project and kept paying for.

Airtable — Notion databases handle our use cases. More limited, but sufficient.

Intercom — This one hurt. Good product. But at our scale, HubSpot’s basic support tools work. We’ll revisit when we have actual support volume.

The Math

Before	After	Savings
$4,200/mo	$1,800/mo	$2,400/mo

Annual savings: $28,800. That’s real runway for an early-stage company.

What We Sacrificed

Honesty time—we lost some capabilities:

Convenience: Slack’s free tier message limit means occasionally searching archives manually. Minor friction.

Polish: HubSpot Starter reports look worse than Enterprise. Nobody outside the company sees them.

Speed: Notion project management requires more setup than Asana’s templates. One-time cost.

Features we might want later: Intercom’s chatbot would help at scale. We’ll add it back when volume justifies cost.

Lessons for Other Startups

Audit annually, minimum. SaaS spending creeps upward. Tools accumulate. Regular review prevents bloat.

Free tiers exist. Many tools we “needed” have adequate free versions. Pride sometimes prevents founders from downgrading.

Consolidation creates complexity. Notion doing five jobs requires more configuration than five specialised tools. Budget time for setup.

Not all users need all tools. Viewer accounts, limited access tiers, and per-seat billing mean you can often reduce without eliminating.

Switching costs are real but finite. We spent about 20 hours total migrating data and retraining the team. Worth it for $28K annual savings.

Tools We’d Pay For Tomorrow

If money were no object (it is), we’d re-add:

Intercom — Genuinely good for customer support at scale Linear — Better than Notion for software development specifically Figma Organisation — Team features matter as design team grows

But we don’t need them today. And “might need eventually” isn’t a reason to pay now.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Half our SaaS spending was aspiration, not need. We bought tools for the company we wanted to be, not the company we are.

That’s expensive optimism. Startups die from optimism.

Before You Cut

Ask these questions for each tool:

1. Who used this in the last 30 days?
2. What happens if we turn it off?
3. Can another tool we’re already paying for do this?
4. Is there a free or cheaper alternative that’s “good enough”?
5. Are we paying for features we don’t use?

If you can’t answer confidently, you probably don’t need the tool.

One More Thing

The team didn’t revolt. I expected pushback on Asana (designers loved it) and Intercom (support lead’s favourite). Instead, they appreciated the financial discipline.

Turns out, people understand that money saved on tools means longer runway and potential future hiring. The trade-off isn’t abstract when it’s their job security.

Start the audit this week. You’ll find money you didn’t know you were spending.