Labour Day SaaS Audit: 7 Subscriptions a 20-Person Indian SMB Overpays For

Zylo's 2025 SaaS Management Index found that 52.7% of purchased software licenses sit idle. We ran a one-hour audit for a 22-person Noida ad-tech firm on a Friday and found a sizeable yearly spend going to seats nobody logged into. The gap between "we pay for it" and "we use it" is where almost every Indian SMB quietly bleeds cash. This post is the exact 60-minute checklist we ran, the seven subscriptions we cut or renegotiated, and the spreadsheet you can copy today.

What's the fastest way to cut SaaS waste at a small company?

Pull every recurring charge from your business card and UPI AutoPay statements for the last three months. List each tool, its monthly cost, who owns it, and the last login date. Cancel anything with zero logins in 60 days, consolidate duplicate tools, and switch active annual-worthy tools off monthly billing. A 20-person firm usually recovers real annual spend in under an hour.

Why this matters now (May 2026)

SaaS spend is climbing, not falling. Zylo's 2025 index reported the first increase in average SaaS spend in three years, with companies wasting roughly $21M a year on unused licenses — up 14.2% year over year. For a 20-person Indian SMB the absolute numbers are smaller, but the ratio is worse: nobody owns the spend, renewals auto-charge, and a monthly tool that one person tried in 2024 still hits the card every month. With RBI's UPI AutoPay making subscription billing frictionless, the silent-renewal problem got bigger, not smaller.

The 7 subscriptions almost every 20-person Indian SMB overpays for

We have run this audit for a dozen small teams. The same seven categories show up every time. Here they are, with the typical waste and the fix.

The 60-minute audit (copy these steps)

You need three things: your business card statement (3 months), your UPI AutoPay mandate list, and admin access to your two biggest tools. Block one hour. Here's the exact run order.

The before-and-after

Here's the actual shape of the Noida firm's audit. Composite, but representative of what a 20-person Indian SMB sees.

That's the annual recovery from seven line items, and it grew once we added two more shadow-IT tools the founders didn't know about. As Vivek Kumar, our CEO, puts it: the cheapest growth lever for a 20-person firm isn't a new tool, it's reading the bill.

The pattern repeats because of how small companies buy software. A founder picks the first three tools. Then each new hire brings their own preference, each team trials something during a busy week, and nobody circles back to cancel. By 20 people you have a stack that grew by accretion, not decision. The audit forces the decision that never happened: for each tool, does the value still clear the cost? Most of the time, for most tools, the answer is yes — which is exactly why the few "no" answers are so easy to miss and so worth finding.

One number surprised the Noida founders more than the total: they had four people with admin rights to the billing portal and none of them could say who had bought the BI dashboard. Spend without an owner is spend without a brake. The fix that outlasts the audit isn't the cancellations — it's naming one person who reviews every new recurring charge before the second invoice lands.

When NOT to cut a subscription

Auditing isn't a race to the lowest number. Cut the wrong tool and you'll re-buy it next month at full price, plus the cost of re-onboarding. Skip the axe in these cases.

Also don't consolidate two tools when the switching cost (data migration, retraining 20 people) exceeds two years of the duplicate's cost. We once watched a team spend three weeks migrating off a small monthly tool to save the subscription — three weeks that cost far more in lost output than two years of the bill. Consolidation is only a saving when the move is cheap. And never cancel a security or backup tool to save a small monthly fee — that's the definition of penny-wise. If you're unsure whether a tool is load-bearing, downgrade first and watch for a month before you cancel.

There's one more trap: cancelling a tool that one quiet team depends on. The marketer who never speaks up in the all-hands may run the entire newsletter on the cheap tool you just axed to hit a number. Before you cancel any small subscription, send a one-line message to the team — "removing X on Friday, shout if you use it." The replies will save you from re-buying at full price next week, and they cost nothing but a day's wait.

Real example: where the audit pays for itself

A 28-person Coimbatore D2C brand we worked with on a marketing-stack review had three analytics tools — one for the founder, one the agency set up, one a marketer trialled. Two were never opened. We cut them, kept one, and redirected the saving into ad spend. The founder later told us the audit "paid for our Q3 retargeting budget." We see the same pattern when we build Radiant Finance-style internal dashboards: clients often realise they were paying three vendors for what one well-scoped build replaces. Softechinfra was founded by Vivek Singh, who has written about treating tooling spend like inventory — count it, or it walks out the door.

Frequently asked questions

How much SaaS spend does a typical 20-person Indian SMB waste?

In our audits, a 20-person firm runs 18–30 active subscriptions and wastes real money every year on idle seats, duplicate tools, and over-provisioned tiers. Zylo's 2025 data shows 52.7% of licenses sit idle industry-wide, so the ratio holds even when the rupee amounts are smaller.

What's the single biggest source of SaaS waste?

Per-seat tools still billing for ex-employees. Offboarding checklists almost never include SaaS seats, so a CRM or Slack keeps charging for people who left months ago. It's the first thing to check and usually the largest recoverable line item.

Is annual billing always cheaper than monthly?

For tools you'll keep all year, yes — annual plans are typically 15–20% cheaper than monthly. The exception is a tool you're unsure about: pay monthly until you've confirmed daily use, then switch to annual at the next renewal to lock the discount.

How do I find subscriptions charged to personal cards?

Ask each team to list any work tools they expense, then cross-check against reimbursement claims. Shadow IT on personal cards never reaches your finance dashboard, so a verbal sweep across design, marketing, and engineering usually surfaces 3–5 hidden tools.

Should I buy a SaaS management platform to do this?

Not at 20 people. A dedicated platform makes sense above ~150 apps. For a small team, a spreadsheet and a recurring quarterly hour beats a paid tool — the platform itself would become another subscription to audit.

How often should we re-run this audit?

Quarterly, tied to your books-close or GST cycle so it has a natural trigger. New tools accumulate fast, and a 15-minute monthly glance at new recurring charges plus a full quarterly hour keeps waste from rebuilding.