Tooling Audit in 30 Minutes: Cut SaaS Bloat and Save Thousands

I logged into Mercury last quarter to reconcile expenses and found $2,300 a month in SaaS subscriptions. Not unusual for a growing company. What was unusual: I could only name about half of them from memory. The rest were trials that auto-converted, tools a contractor signed up for six months ago, or duplicates of something we already had.

This is SaaS creep, and it happens to every founder I know. You sign up for a tool to solve a Tuesday problem. It works. You forget about it. Three months later it’s billing you $49/month and nobody has logged in since onboarding week.

The dollar amount matters, but it’s not the real cost. The real cost is cognitive. Every tool in your stack is a surface area for notifications, integrations, logins, and “did you see that update in [tool name]?” conversations. A bloated stack makes your operations feel heavier than they are.

Why I audit quarterly

I started doing tooling audits after I bought my company back from private equity. During that transition I inherited a stack that had been growing unchecked for two years. When I finally sat down and mapped every subscription, I cut 11 tools in a single afternoon. Monthly spend dropped by about $1,500, but more importantly, onboarding a new team member went from “here are the 23 tools you need” to “here are 9.”

Now I do this every quarter. It takes 30 minutes. The ROI is absurd — both in dollars saved and in the clarity you get from knowing exactly what runs your business and why.

The 30-minute audit, step by step

Step 1: Export your charges (5 minutes)

Pull the last 60 days of charges from wherever your business cards live. For me that’s Mercury — I can export a CSV in about 30 seconds. If you use multiple cards, pull them all. If you’re on Brex or Ramp, even easier: they categorize SaaS automatically.

You’re looking for any recurring charge. Don’t filter yet. Just get the raw list into a spreadsheet or even a notes doc. I use a simple Notion table with three columns: Tool, Monthly Cost, Label.

Step 2: Label everything — Core, Nice, or Dead (10 minutes)

Go through every line item and tag it with one of three labels:

Core — The business breaks without this. Slack, your payment processor, your email platform, your project management tool. If it disappeared tomorrow, something important stops working.
Nice — Useful but not essential. That analytics dashboard you check once a month. The design tool your team uses for one-off projects. The scheduling app that saves 10 minutes a week.
Dead — Nobody has logged in recently, it duplicates something else, or the problem it solved no longer exists. Be honest here. If you have to think about who uses it, it’s probably dead.

This step goes fast once you commit to being ruthless. I usually end up with about 60% Core, 25% Nice, and 15% Dead. If your Dead pile is smaller than 10%, you’re probably not being honest with yourself.

Step 3: Apply the weekly usage test (5 minutes)

For anything labeled Nice, ask one question: Did anyone on the team use this in the last seven days?

Not “could someone use it.” Not “we might need it next month.” Did someone actually open it and do work in it this week?

If the answer is no, move it from Nice to Dead. This single question has saved me more money than any budgeting exercise. Tools that get used weekly are earning their keep. Tools that get used “occasionally” are almost always cuttable.

Step 4: Reassign owners (5 minutes)

Every tool that survives the audit needs exactly one person accountable for it. Not a team. One name. That person owns the relationship with the vendor, decides on plan tiers, manages user seats, and is the first call if something breaks.

When I ran my ops stack audit, I found three tools where nobody could tell me who was responsible. Two of those were Dead tools that had been billing us for months. The third was a Core tool running on a plan two tiers above what we needed because nobody had reviewed it since signup.

Step 5: Cancel the Dead list (5 minutes)

Do it now. Not after the meeting. Not next week. Open each one, find the cancellation flow, and kill it. Some will try to lure you with “pause” options or discounted months. Ignore them. If a tool is Dead, it’s Dead. You can always re-subscribe later if something changes.

I keep a running list in Notion of everything I’ve cancelled and the date. Twice I’ve re-subscribed to something months later because the need came back. That’s fine. The other nine times, I never thought about the tool again.

What to do with “Nice” tools that survive

If a Nice tool passes the weekly usage test, it stays — but put it on probation. I mark it in my audit spreadsheet and revisit it next quarter. If it shows up as Nice two quarters in a row without graduating to Core, that’s a signal. Either the team needs to commit to using it properly or it’s time to let it go.

Some Nice tools are genuinely seasonal. A tax prep tool, a holiday campaign builder, an annual survey platform. Those get a pass. Everything else needs to prove itself.

Tools I’ve actually cut

For context, here are real tools I’ve cancelled in the last year:

A $79/month project management tool we switched away from but never cancelled
Two different Zapier-like automation platforms (we consolidated to one — I wrote about this)
A $29/month social scheduling tool that nobody had posted from in three months
An analytics platform that duplicated what Fathom already gave us
A meeting transcription service after I realized the AI built into Zoom covered 90% of the use case
Three seats on a design tool used by one person

Total recovered: roughly $400/month, or close to $5,000/year. Not life-changing money, but that’s one quarter of auditing. Compounded over years of doing this, the savings are significant.

Making it a quarterly habit

The hardest part of this audit is remembering to do it. Here’s my system:

Calendar it. I have a recurring 30-minute block on the first Monday of every quarter. It’s called “Tooling Audit” and it’s non-negotiable.
Keep last quarter’s list. Don’t start from scratch. Duplicate your previous audit, re-export charges, and update. This makes each subsequent audit faster because you’re only evaluating what changed.
Do it alone first. If you have a team, do your own pass before asking for input. You’ll make cleaner decisions without “but we might need it” committee energy.

Thirty minutes, four times a year. That’s two hours annually to keep your stack intentional, your spend controlled, and your operations light. There’s no productivity hack with a better return on time.