How Many SaaS Tools Does Your Business Actually Use? (It's Probably More Than You Think)

Key takeaways

• A company with 75–199 employees uses an average of 44 SaaS applications¹. Ask around before you count, and see what number comes back.

• Workers toggle between apps roughly 1,200 times per day, losing about four hours a week just reorienting after each switch²

• The subscription bill is the cheapest part of sprawl. The data silos and security blind spots underneath it cost more and show up nowhere

• Cutting tools rarely fixes it. Fixing the workflows that run between them usually does, and the tools stay exactly where they are

Ask someone on your team how many software tools the business runs on. They’ll probably say ten. Maybe fifteen.

Nobody has measured how wrong that guess usually is, so we won’t pretend to. But the other half of the comparison has been measured, and it isn’t close.

Productiv’s 2024 data puts a company with 75 to 199 employees at an average of 44 SaaS applications.¹ BetterCloud’s 2024 State of SaaS report put the average across all company sizes at 106, down from a peak of 130 in 2022.³

Both of those companies sell SaaS management software, so read the figures as a ceiling rather than a target. Even read that way, 44 is a long way from fifteen.

That gap has nothing to do with carelessness. Software gets adopted one team at a time, one problem at a time, and nobody anywhere is keeping a register.

What you don’t know about, you can’t manage. Every untracked tool is a billing line nobody reviews and a data silo that somebody on your team is quietly bridging with copy-paste. The industry calls this SaaS sprawl (sometimes app sprawl). Whatever you call it, if you haven’t counted recently, you’re living with more of it than you think.

Here’s how to count what you’ve actually got, what the sprawl costs you in the places no invoice reaches, and which gaps are worth closing first. The counting takes an afternoon.

Where they all came from

SaaS sprawl doesn’t happen because someone made a bad decision. It happens because everyone made a reasonable one.

Marketing needed an email platform, so they signed up for Mailchimp. Sales wanted a CRM, so someone started a HubSpot trial. Operations needed shipping labels, so they added ShipStation. Finance needed invoicing, so they set up Xero. Every one of those was the right call on the day it was made.

Nobody was looking at the whole picture, and most of the growth happens where the picture doesn’t reach. Gartner puts it at 41% of employees acquiring, modifying or creating technology outside IT’s visibility, rising to a projected 75% by 2027.⁴ Big companies file that under shadow IT and staff a team to chase it. In a small business without a dedicated IT function, nearly everything is shadow IT, and the team chasing it is you.

There’s no malice in any of it. The marketing intern signed up for Canva with the company card. Someone on the ops team started tracking projects in Notion. A developer spun up a Supabase instance for one workflow and moved on.

Nobody decides to own forty-four tools, in the same way nobody decides to own nine phone chargers. The pile just grows, and nothing ever gets thrown out. Three tools that do project management. Two that handle file storage. A handful of niche apps that one person uses for one task, which nobody else could name under oath.

How to audit your stack

The process is simpler than you’d expect. The results are less comfortable.

Start with the money. Pull twelve months of company card and bank statements, and write down every recurring charge from a software vendor. You’ll find things you’d forgotten you were paying for.

Everybody does. The first count always comes in worse than the guess, and it comes in worst for the people who were certain it wouldn’t.

Next, check your identity provider or SSO dashboard. Most small businesses don’t have one, so look at the Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 admin panel instead. That shows which third-party applications have been granted access through OAuth, which is the “Sign in with Google” button your team clicks without reading. Zylo’s 2025 SaaS Management Index found that organizations use just 47% of the SaaS licenses they pay for.⁵ Less than half, across the whole stack. (Zylo sells a tool that finds idle licenses, so of course they would say that. Every company quoted in this article has a horse in the race, us very much included.) Canceling the idle ones is the fastest win an audit produces, and it usually pays for the afternoon you spent finding them.

Then the awkward part. Ask your team, and ask in writing so the answers are on a page rather than in a corridor:

What tools do you use every day?

What do you use a few times a month?

What do you pay for yourself and expense?

What are you using that you’re fairly sure nobody else knows about?

People will name things that appear nowhere in your financial records. Browser extensions, freemium accounts, a trial from 2023 that nobody canceled. They all count, because they all touch your data.

Call them corridor tools. They live in one person’s head and one person’s browser, and the day that person leaves, they go quiet without anyone noticing.

Finally, sort the list by what each tool actually does. CRM, email marketing, project management, accounting, shipping, file storage, analytics. This is where the overlaps jump out. Two teams on two different project trackers. Three apps that can each email a customer. A spreadsheet doing a database’s job because nobody knew the CRM already had that feature, which happens more than you’d think.

The hidden costs

The subscription bill is the visible cost, and Zylo’s 2025 data puts average SaaS spend at $4,830 per employee per year.⁵

It’s also the least interesting number, because almost nobody connects it to the work it’s supposed to support. For one multichannel retailer we spread every recurring subscription across the orders it helped produce. A monthly bill nobody questioned became a cost per sale somebody could act on.

The operational costs are worse, and they compound quietly.

The big one is time lost moving between disconnected systems. A 2022 study published in Harvard Business Review tracked workers across three Fortune 500 companies and clocked roughly 1,200 toggles between applications in a single day. Twelve hundred! That worked out to four hours a week spent reorienting after each switch, or about five working weeks a year.²

In a small business it’s worse than tab-hopping. The systems share no data at all, so on top of losing their place, people retype what the other system already knows. There’s a reason “app fatigue” turned into everyday vocabulary on operations teams.

We see it constantly. One client had a sales team that left their order management system to check warehouse stock in a separate portal before every order, because the two tools didn’t talk. Nothing dramatic ever went wrong. It was a slow, steady drain on time and accuracy that everyone had long since accepted as normal.

Security hides in plain sight too. Every tool that touches your data is a door into the building, and nobody has drawn the floor plan. You can’t enforce a password policy on something you don’t know exists. When someone leaves, their access leaves with them only in the sense that nobody revokes it. With Gartner projecting 75% of employees adopting technology outside IT’s visibility by 2027,⁴ that surface only grows.

Then there’s onboarding. Every new hire has to learn a dozen tools, each with its own login and its own small ways of being weird. The onboarding period stretches, mistakes go up, and tribal knowledge becomes the only documentation that matters. When someone leaves, they take the understanding of how all the pieces fit together with them. You don’t lose a person. You lose the wiring diagram.

Why “just use fewer tools” fails

Faced with a list that long, the instinct is to start cutting. Some consolidation genuinely does make sense.

All-in-one platforms like HubSpot or Zoho work well for businesses with straightforward workflows. If your needs are standard, one platform covering CRM, email marketing and basic automation is simpler to manage and cheaper to run than four best-of-breed tools you have to wire together yourself. Fewer vendors, and one support queue to shout at. We’ve watched that work.

That suitability has a ceiling, though.

The all-in-one that handles CRM, email marketing, project management and invoicing does each of them adequately and none of them well, which stops being acceptable the moment your requirements get specific. Your marketing team chose their email tool for its segmentation. Your operations team chose their inventory system because it handles multi-warehouse logic. Swap both for one platform that does neither properly and you’ve traded a sprawl problem for a capability problem, and customers notice the second one.

Here’s the thing the count hides. A business running 100 tools that talk to each other is in better shape than a business running 15 where somebody spends every morning reconciling three of them by hand. Sprawl is the symptom you can see. The work happening in the gaps is what actually costs you.

So the more productive question is how to make what you already own behave like one system. When an order lands and stock updates across every channel on its own, and those changes reach your accounting platform without anyone touching a spreadsheet, you’ve solved the sprawl problem without deleting a single tool.

One client was spending 20 minutes on every lost-parcel compensation claim, cross-referencing their shipping platform against their accounting platform by hand. Both tools were fine. The gap between them was where 240 hours a year went.

Now the obvious disclosure: SaaS Glue does this for a living, so of course we lean toward “connect them” over “replace them.” Weigh that accordingly. What we can tell you is which one sticks. Consolidation projects stall, because people fight to keep the tool that works for them, and they usually win. Workflow projects tend to land faster, because nothing changes for the person doing the job. Their screens stay the same. The data just starts arriving on its own.

What to fix first

You won’t do all of it at once, and you shouldn’t want to. The value of the audit is that it shows you where manual work and data mismatches are costing you the most. Start there.

Look for the places where a person is the middleware. Who is copying data out of one system and into another? Where does a process stall because the information lives in a tool the next person can’t open? Where have errors crept in because something got re-keyed instead of synced?

Then rank by who finds out. Anything that touches money or stock goes first, because that’s where a mistake stops being an internal annoyance and starts being a customer’s problem. A broken sync between your store and your warehouse doesn’t just confuse the office. It oversells stock you don’t have, and the customer finds out before you do.

For lighter work (form submissions landing in a CRM, a Slack ping when a deal closes) Zapier or Make are perfectly adequate, and a great deal cheaper than anything we’d build you. Save the custom work for the connections where reliability actually matters, and where having someone who owns it long term changes the outcome.

Living with sprawl, deliberately

Sprawl isn’t going away. Your SaaS bill went up last year, and so did everyone else’s. Gartner forecasts SaaS end-user spending growing at nearly 20% year on year, with SMBs now projected to put more than half their technology budget into cloud services.⁶ Next year you’ll buy something else, because next year somebody on your team will have a problem that a monthly subscription solves by Friday.

The question is only whether it happens deliberately or by accident.

So put the audit in the calendar once a year, in the slot next to the insurance renewal, and let it be rough. A half-day that produces a categorized list of your tools, what they cost, who uses them and how data moves between them will tell you what to cancel and where the expensive gaps are. It will also tell you which corridor tools have quietly become load-bearing, which is worth knowing before the person holding them books a holiday.

Nobody needs a pristine, minimal stack. What helps is a stack you understand, where the workflows that matter run on their own and nobody is carrying data across the gaps by hand. Get that far and the count stops being a problem. It’s just trivia about your own company.

Frequently asked questions: SaaS sprawl and tool audits

How many SaaS tools does a typical small business use?

Productiv's 2024 data shows companies with 75 to 199 employees use an average of 44 SaaS applications. Most teams underestimate their actual count because many tools are adopted informally by individual team members without any central tracking.

What is SaaS sprawl?

SaaS sprawl is the uncontrolled growth of software subscriptions across a business. It happens when teams independently adopt tools to solve specific problems without coordinating with each other, leading to overlapping functionality, data silos, security blind spots, and rising costs.

How do I audit my business's SaaS stack?

Start by reviewing twelve months of credit card and bank statements for recurring software charges. Then check your Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 admin panel for third-party OAuth connections. Finally, survey your team to uncover tools that don't appear in financial records: browser extensions, freemium accounts, and trial subscriptions nobody canceled. Categorize everything by function to spot the overlaps.

Should I try to reduce the number of tools my business uses?

Not necessarily. All-in-one platforms work well for businesses with straightforward workflows, but most specialized tools exist for a good reason. Forcing teams onto a platform that does everything adequately and nothing well tends to create more problems than it solves. The better question is whether your tools share data. Fixing the workflows that run between them usually delivers more than consolidation does.

What is shadow IT and why does it matter for small businesses?

Shadow IT is software adopted by employees without formal approval or IT oversight. According to Gartner, 41% of employees acquire technology outside IT's visibility, and in small businesses without a dedicated IT function that figure is likely higher. It matters because untracked tools create security risks, redundant spending, and data silos that nobody is managing.

What should I integrate first?

Prioritize the workflows where people are manually moving data between systems, especially anything involving money, inventory, or customer-facing operations. Errors in those areas have the most immediate business impact. Lighter workflows like form-to-CRM pushes can often be handled with low-code tools like Zapier.

How often should I audit my SaaS tools?

At least once a year. A half-day exercise that produces a categorized list of your tools, their costs, who uses them, and how data flows between them is enough to identify redundant subscriptions, security gaps, and high-value integration opportunities.

References

¹ Productiv – 2024 State of SaaS Trends: Growth. Available at: https://productiv.com/state-of-saas/2024-saas-trends-growth/

² Harvard Business Review – How Much Time and Energy Do We Waste Toggling Between Applications?, 2022. Available at: https://hbr.org/2022/08/how-much-time-and-energy-do-we-waste-toggling-between-applications

³ BetterCloud – 2024 State of SaaS Report. Available at: https://www.bettercloud.com/monitor/the-2024-state-of-saasops-report/

⁴ Gartner – Managing the Risks of Shadow IT, 2022. Available at: https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/what-is-shadow-it

⁵ Zylo – 2025 SaaS Management Index. Available at: https://zylo.com/reports/2025-saas-management-index/

⁶ Gartner – Forecast: Public Cloud Services, Worldwide, 2024. Available at: https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2024-11-19-gartner-forecasts-worldwide-public-cloud-end-user-spending-to-total-723-billion-dollars-in-2025