We cut our tool stack from 14 to 6. Productivity didn't drop.
At peak we were paying for 14 SaaS tools across a team of 8. Some of them had a single user.
We did an audit: who used what, how often, what would break if it disappeared tomorrow.
Four tools: nobody could name the last time they'd logged in. Three tools: one person used them, and that person could easily switch. Two tools: overlapped heavily with something else we already had.
We cancelled 8 subscriptions. Saved about $2,400/month.
Productivity didn't drop. If anything, context-switching got easier because there were fewer places to check.
The hardest part was the "but we might need it" feeling. We didn't need it. We were just used to it being there.
I think tool sprawl is underrated as a hidden cost - not just in money but in the cognitive load of knowing what lives where.
What tools have you held onto longer than you should have? And what finally made you let go?
Replies
the criteria you used catches the obviously dead stuff, but the tools that are actually hard to cut are the ones that pass that exact same audit and still matter: the monitoring dashboard nobody opens until there's an incident, the export only finance touches once a quarter at close. low usage and "we'd be in real trouble without it" look identical on a login-frequency report. did any of the 8 you cut almost get kept for that reason, or did you get a clean read where low usage genuinely meant low value across the board?
Sometimes the simplest fix is just going back to what worked before