How to Audit SaaS Sprawl & Tooling Costs

Software spend creeps up seat by seat. Teams add a tool for one project, keep the free tier habit after the card is on file, and never compare “what we pay” to “what we use.” A useful audit is not a spreadsheet of logos—it is a decision per tool: Keep, Configure, Replace, or Build.

Pull the last 12 months of card statements, invoices, and marketplace bills. List every recurring charge: tool name, monthly or annual amount, seats paid vs seats active, named owner, and next renewal. If nobody owns it, that is already a finding. Include “small” tools—$15–40 lines are where Indian SME and early startup stacks often leak. Include email seats (Workspace, Zoho) and AI add-ons the same way you list hosting.

For each tool, write one sentence: the job it does for the business. Mark overlap (two tools for the same job), workflows that still live in chat or sheets, and tools nobody would notice if paused for a week. Feature lists sell renewals; job mapping ends them.

Keep when fit and cost are sane. Configure when the product is right but roles, integrations, or settings are wrong. Replace when a mature SaaS or open-source path is clearly better on total cost. Build only when nothing else creates the differentiating workflow. Migration and setup are separate work—not part of a diagnosis-only review.

For every Replace or cancel, write current monthly cost, proposed path, one-time migration effort (hours or rupees), and monthly after. Include ops time for self-host: if you “save” $20 but spend five hours a month babysitting, you did not save. We use the same sheet shape in every Stack Review.

Complete inventory and cost breakdown, a Keep / Configure / Replace / Build call per tool, a five-point check (Business Fit, Team Capability, Self-Hosting Cost, Security, Migration Risk), before/after ROI notes, a Notion report, and a 30-minute principal call. Delivery in about three days. Implementation is scoped separately so the recommendation stays honest.

See ReframeHub tool notes for concrete numbers—e.g. self-hosted Postgres vs RDS, Supabase Cloud vs self-host, and Agentic Inbox (architecture review of Cloudflare Workers email vs managed mail seats). Use the free Stack Decision Checklist when you want to run a first pass yourself.