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. Most teams guess about half that number.

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

• SaaS sprawl is not just a cost problem. It creates data silos, security blind spots, and onboarding complexity that quietly drain productivity

• The answer is rarely “use fewer tools.” It is making the tools you already have work together through deliberate integration

Ask someone on your team how many software tools the business uses. They will probably say ten, maybe fifteen. The actual number is almost certainly double that.

Productiv’s 2024 data shows that a company with 75 to 199 employees uses an average of 44 SaaS applications.¹ Larger companies use far more. 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 But even 44 is a lot more than most small business owners would guess, and the gap between perception and reality is not carelessness. It is the nature of how software gets adopted: one team at a time, one problem at a time, with nobody keeping a central register.

That gap matters because what you do not know about, you cannot manage. Every untracked tool is a potential security exposure, a billing line nobody reviews, and a data silo that somebody on your team is bridging manually with copy-paste or CSV exports. The industry calls this SaaS sprawl (sometimes app sprawl). Whatever you call it, if you have not audited your stack recently, you are living with more of it than you realise.

Where all these tools come from

SaaS sprawl does not 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. Each tool solved a real problem and was a sensible choice in isolation.

The issue is that nobody was looking at the whole picture. Over time, these individual decisions accumulate. Much of that growth comes from what the industry calls shadow IT: tools that employees adopt on their own, outside any formal procurement process. According to Gartner, 41% of employees acquire, modify, or create technology outside of IT’s visibility, and that figure is projected to reach 75% by 2027.⁴ In a small business without a dedicated IT function, nearly everything is shadow IT. There is no malice in it. The marketing intern signed up for Canva with the company card. Someone on the ops team started using Notion for project tracking. A developer spun up a Supabase instance for a side workflow. All perfectly reasonable, all invisible to anyone trying to understand the full stack.

The result is a tool collection that grows organically, without pruning. You end up with three tools that do project management, two that handle file storage, and a handful of niche apps that one person uses for one task and nobody else knows about.

How to actually audit your stack

If you have never done a SaaS stack audit (sometimes called a software subscription audit), the process is simpler than you might expect. The results are usually uncomfortable, but the process is not. Start with the obvious sources: your company credit card and bank statements for the past twelve months. Every recurring charge from a software vendor goes on the list. You will be surprised how many you have forgotten about.

Next, check your identity provider or single sign-on dashboard if you have one. If you do not (and most small businesses do not), look at Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 admin panels. These show which third-party applications have been granted access via OAuth, the “Sign in with Google” button your team clicks without thinking. Zylo’s 2025 SaaS Management Index found that organisations use just 47% of their SaaS licences, with the rest sitting idle.⁵ Finding those unused licences is one of the quickest wins an audit delivers.

Then comes the harder part: asking your team. Send a simple survey. “What tools do you use daily? Weekly? What do you pay for personally and expense?” People will mention things that appear nowhere in your financial records. Browser extensions, freemium tools, trial accounts that never got cancelled. They all count, because they all touch your data.

Once you have the list, categorise each tool by function: CRM, email marketing, project management, accounting, shipping, file storage, communication, analytics, and so on. This is where you will spot the overlaps. Two teams using different project management tools. Three different apps that can send email. A spreadsheet doing the job of a database because nobody knew the CRM had that feature. That last one is more common than you would think.

The hidden costs you are already paying

The most visible cost of SaaS sprawl is the subscription bill itself. Zylo’s 2025 data puts average SaaS spend at $4,830 per employee per year.⁵ But the invoice total is the least interesting number.

The operational costs are worse, and they compound quietly. The biggest one is the time your team loses moving between disconnected systems. A 2022 study published in Harvard Business Review tracked workers across three Fortune 500 companies and found they toggled between applications roughly 1,200 times per day. That added up to four hours per week spent just reorienting after each switch, or about five working weeks per year.² In a small business, the switching is often not between tabs on the same screen. It is between completely different systems that do not share data, which means people are not just switching context. They are re-entering information. There is a reason “app fatigue” has become common vocabulary in operations teams. Too many software subscriptions, none of them talking to each other, and staff burning time on the gaps between them.

We see this regularly with our clients. One had a sales team that had to leave their order management system to manually check warehouse stock in a separate portal because the two tools did not talk to each other. It was not a dramatic failure. It was a slow, constant drain on time and accuracy that the team had accepted as normal.

Security is the other cost that hides in plain sight. Every SaaS tool that touches your data is a potential attack surface. If you do not know a tool exists, you cannot enforce password policies, enable two-factor authentication, or revoke access when someone leaves. And with Gartner projecting that 75% of employees will be adopting technology outside IT’s visibility by 2027,⁴ the surface area is only growing. In small businesses without a dedicated IT function, it is arguably already there.

Then there is onboarding. Every new hire has to learn a dozen or more tools, each with its own login, its own interface conventions, its own quirks. The onboarding period stretches longer, mistakes happen more frequently, and tribal knowledge becomes the only documentation that matters. When someone leaves, they take with them the understanding of how all these pieces fit together. You do not lose a person. You lose the wiring diagram.

Why “just reduce your tools” is the wrong advice

The instinct when confronted with a long list of SaaS tools is to start cutting. Cancel the duplicates, consolidate onto fewer platforms, simplify. That impulse is understandable but usually misguided.

To be fair, some consolidation makes sense. All-in-one platforms like HubSpot or Zoho work well for businesses with straightforward workflows. If your needs are standard, a single platform that covers CRM, email marketing, and basic automation can be simpler to manage and cheaper to run than separate best-of-breed tools. But that suitability has limits. The all-in-one that handles CRM, email marketing, project management, and invoicing tends to do each of those things adequately and none of them well for businesses with specific or complex requirements. Your marketing team chose their email tool because it has the segmentation features they need. Your operations team chose their inventory system because it handles multi-warehouse logic. Replacing those with a single platform that does both poorly is not simplification. It is a different kind of dysfunction.

The more productive question is: how do we make these tools share data and work as a system? When your order management system automatically updates inventory across channels, and stock changes flow into your accounting platform without anyone touching a spreadsheet, you have solved the sprawl problem without removing a single tool. One of our clients was spending 20 minutes on each lost-parcel compensation claim, manually cross-referencing data between their shipping and accounting platforms. The tools were fine individually. The gap between them was the problem, and automating that handoff saved roughly 240 hours a year.

We should acknowledge the obvious here: SaaS Glue is an integration company. We have an inherent bias toward “connect your tools” over “replace them.” But we also see, regularly, which approach actually sticks. Consolidation projects tend to stall because teams resist giving up the tools that work for them. Integration projects tend to deliver value faster because nothing changes for the people doing the work. Their tools stay the same. The data just starts flowing between them.

Deciding what to connect first

You will not integrate everything at once, nor should you. The value of an audit is that it shows you where the biggest gaps are, where manual work, data mismatches, or process delays are costing you the most. Start there.

Look for the workflows where people are the middleware. Where is someone copying data from one system to another? Where is a process bottlenecked because information lives in a tool that the next person in the chain does not have access to? Where have errors crept in because data was re-keyed instead of synced? Those are your highest-value integration opportunities.

Prioritise by impact and risk. Integrations that touch money, inventory, or customer-facing operations should come first, because errors there have the most immediate consequences. A broken sync between your ecommerce platform and your warehouse does not just create internal confusion. It creates overselling, delayed shipments, and customer-facing failures.

For lighter workflows (pushing form submissions into a CRM, or sending Slack notifications when a deal closes) low-code tools like Zapier or Make are often perfectly adequate. Save the custom integration work for the connections that matter, where having a dedicated integration partner makes a material difference to reliability and long-term maintenance.

Living with sprawl, deliberately

SaaS sprawl is not going away. Subscription fatigue is real, but the answer is not to fight the tide. Your SaaS bill went up last year, and it was not just you. Gartner forecasts SaaS end-user spending growing at nearly 20% year-on-year, and SMBs are now projected to spend more than half their technology budgets on cloud services.⁶ Your business will keep adopting software because software keeps solving real problems. The question is whether you do it deliberately or accidentally.

A regular audit, even once a year, keeps you aware of what you have, what you are paying for, and where the gaps are. It does not have to be exhaustive. A half-day exercise that produces a categorised list of your tools, their costs, who uses them, and how data moves between them is enough to make informed decisions. You will find subscriptions to cancel, overlaps to resolve, and integrations that would save your team real time.

The goal is not a pristine, minimal stack. It is a stack you understand and control, where the tools that matter are connected and the data flows where it needs to go without someone manually carrying it there.

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 do not appear in financial records: browser extensions, freemium accounts, and trial subscriptions. Categorise everything by function to spot 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 specialised tools exist for a good reason. Forcing teams onto platforms that do everything adequately but nothing well often creates more problems than it solves. The better question is whether your tools share data effectively. Integration between the right tools usually delivers more value than consolidation.

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?

Prioritise integrations where people are manually moving data between systems, especially workflows involving money, inventory, or customer-facing operations. Errors in these 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 categorised 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