The $180k Problem: SaaS Sprawl Is Eating Your Margin

If you run a 20–250 employee firm, you are almost certainly spending between $10k and $25k a month on software. Walk through it line by line and the picture gets worse, not better: half the seats you're paying for belong to people who left, a third of the tools overlap in function, and the best-loved "essential" platform in your stack is usually the one your team works around, not with.

We call this the $180k problem. It is the silent number that shows up in every SaaS audit we run, almost without exception.

The anatomy of the $180k

Here's the stack we see most often at a firm of 80 employees:

• CRM + marketing: $2,200/mo
• Project / matter management: $1,800/mo
• Document + e-signature: $1,400/mo
• Communication (Slack, Zoom, video): $1,100/mo
• Accounting + billing: $1,600/mo
• HR / payroll / benefits: $1,800/mo
• Point solutions (forms, scheduling, tracking, BI, etc.): $3,100/mo
• "Intelligence" overlays (Gong, People, Dashboards): $2,000/mo

That's ~$15k a month, or ~$180k a year, before a single hour of configuration, integration, or licensing overrun.

What the $180k buys you

It buys a lot of login screens. It does not buy leverage. It does not buy differentiation. It does not buy software that reflects how your firm actually works — it buys software built for the average of your category, which is to say, for no one.

It also buys a predictable set of year-two problems: a 12–18% price hike at renewal, a new seat tier you didn't ask for, and a sales rep who wants to "catch up" about your roadmap.

The alternative isn't "build it yourself"

The standard rebuttal to this math is: "Sure, but building custom software is even more expensive." That was true in 2019. It is not true in 2026.

A flat $8–15k/mo managed engagement ships one purpose-built product a quarter. At the end of the first year, you own four products. Each one replaces at least one SaaS subscription. The best ones replace three or four.

Do the math: if four products in year one cancel $10k/mo of SaaS, you've covered the managed service fee with surplus to spare, and you own the software at the end.

The reframe

The question stops being "how do we save on software?" and starts being "how do we stop renting and start owning?" Those are different businesses.

If you want the one-pager of your current stack with the ranked kill-list, book the audit — it's free, and you keep the deliverable either way.