CalcStack — free, instant, no signup. The interactive calculator loads automatically.
A $2,400/mo stack at 8% vendor creep becomes $2,799/mo by year 3 — $93,496 total, and $37,399 of it is shelfware. The quarterly audit is the highest-ROI hour in your quarter.
SaaS spend grows in silence: vendors raise list prices 5–10% a year, forced tier upgrades add features nobody uses, and seat counts drift up with hiring and never drift down. A $2,400/month stack at 8% creep costs $93,496 over three years — and industry surveys (Flexera, Gartner) keep finding 30–45% of it is shelfware: unused logins, duplicated tools, zombie trials that converted. That is $37,399 of waste hiding in the card statements. The fix is boring and brutal: a quarterly audit with last-login data, three buckets (kill, downgrade, negotiate), and a renewal calendar that ends auto-renewal as a business model. This calculator sizes your creep and your reclaim.
Business owners use it quarterly: a $2,400/mo stack at 8% vendor creep costs $93,496 over 3 years, and the surveyed 30–45% shelfware share means the audit hour is the best-paid hour of the quarter.
Ninety minutes, quarterly, with statements and login data. Step one — the export: pull every recurring software charge from the card and bank statements (search for the vendors AND the payment processors — plenty of tools bill through Paddle, Stripe, or app stores under unrecognizable names); every mystery charge is investigated, not assumed. Step two — the inventory: for each tool, name the owner (a person, not a department), the purpose, the seat count versus actual logins (admin consoles or your identity provider show last-login; 90 days idle is the kill threshold), and the renewal date. Step three — three buckets: KILL (no logins, duplicated function — you do not need two project trackers or three e-sign tools), DOWNGRADE (seats set at hire-date peaks, tiers bought for one feature, annual plans on zombies — monthly is cheaper for anything you might cancel), and NEGOTIATE (everything else: at renewal, 60 days out, with a credible cancellation threat — vendors staff retention desks with real discount authority, and 10–30% concessions are routine). Step four — the calendar: every renewal date in a shared calendar with a 60-day alert, because auto-renewal is the creep delivery mechanism and the alert is the kill switch. The first audit routinely finds 20–40% of spend; later audits hold the line.
Because buying is easy and owning is invisible — the failure is structural, not personal. The acquisition pattern: someone hits a 2-hour problem, finds a tool, and puts $40/seat × 15 seats on a card — $7,200/yr for a problem a spreadsheet solved free; multiplied by every team lead with a card, the stack doubles annually. The visibility failure: SaaS lands on cards, not POs, so nobody owns the total — finance sees charges, IT sees logins, owners see their tool, and nobody sees the stack. The seat drift: seats get added at onboarding and removed at nobody's offboarding — ex-employee licenses are the purest shelfware, and identity-provider reports make them findable in minutes. The bundling miss: Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace tiers quietly include half the point tools you pay for separately — Teams versus Slack, Planner versus Trello, Forms versus SurveyMonkey; the bundle you already own is the first place to cut. And the tier trap: vendors design feature gates so the ONE feature you need lives in the tier above — sometimes the fix is a workaround, sometimes a competitor, sometimes just paying it knowingly. The structural fix: one owner per tool, one card for software, a 60-day renewal alert, and procurement-lite approval past $50/mo — not bureaucracy, just a second pair of eyes asking "does something we own already do this?"
When it prices against labor honestly — the comparison this calculator quietly implies. A $50/mo tool that saves an employee 2 hours a month at a $40 loaded hourly is a 60% ROI before counting errors avoided; the tools that survive audit do that math out loud. The keep-test, applied per tool: name the workflow it owns, measure the hours it saves or the revenue it touches, and divide — cost per hour saved under $20 is usually a keep, over $100 needs a story. Consolidation candidates that survive scrutiny: the CRM (migration cost exceeds most savings — switching CRMs is surgery), the accounting stack, and anything holding historical data with compliance value. The opposite failure to avoid: cutting a $200/mo tool that quietly carries a workflow, then paying $8,000 of consultant time to rebuild it — the audit kills zombies, not load-bearing walls. And the forward discipline: every new tool enters with an owner, a renewal date, and a success metric written down — "we bought it to cut proposal time from 4 hours to 1" — so next quarter's audit has something to measure. The stack that survives four quarterly audits is usually half the size, a third cheaper, and better loved, because the tools that remain are the ones people actually open.