You're probably paying for licences nobody uses

Why software leaks more than any other category

A cleaning contract is signed once and then sits still. Software instead grows uncontrolled, because it's rarely bought centrally. Marketing brings in one tool, IT another, project management a third. Each individual purchase is small enough not to require a decision, and together they become one of the largest items in the budget.

On top of that, licences are almost never cancelled. When someone leaves, the account is removed from the system but the seat stays in the contract. When a project ends the tool is forgotten but keeps being charged every month. Nobody notices, because the sum is the same as last month.

That's also why the category has the highest savings potential of any we work with. The room doesn't come from negotiating a price down — it comes from stopping paying for things you don't use.

Three ways the money disappears

Almost everything we find falls into one of three categories. They require entirely different actions, so it's worth separating them before you start.

Price negotiation comes fourth — and is usually the smallest of the four.

Unused seats — the quietest cost

This is the single most common leak, and the easiest to prove. Almost every system can show when a user last logged in. Compare that list against the number of seats you pay for.

Three things create the gap:

• The offboarding gap. Someone leaves, the account is deactivated in the system, but the seat is still counted in the contract. It only shows if someone actively removes it.
• Project tools. A tool is bought for a project, the project ends, nobody cancels the subscription.
• Buffer purchases. Ten seats were bought to grow into. The growth didn't come, or came somewhere else.

The overlaps we find most often

A company with fifty employees typically has two to four systems doing the same job. It's rarely carelessness — it's that tools get bought by different people at different times, and nobody has the overall picture.

What often makes the decision easy is that one of the options is already included in something you pay for. Then the question isn't which is best, but which is free.

Wrong tier — paying for features nobody uses

Almost all cloud services have several pricing tiers, and the difference between them is rarely just capacity. The higher tier often contains features for governance, auditing or compliance that a company of fifty neither uses nor needs.

The upgrade often happened for the sake of one single feature, years ago, and then the reason was forgotten. Sometimes the feature is now available in the lower tier too.

The question to ask per system: which feature requires us to be on this tier, and who uses it? If nobody can answer, that's a sign.

The contract model determines what you can do

Two contracts with the same monthly cost can give completely different room to manoeuvre. Before you do anything, it's worth knowing which model you have.

Monthly typically costs more per seat but lets you scale down whenever you like. Annual is cheaper per seat — but only if you actually use the seats all year. For a company growing unevenly, it's often cheaper to pay more per month.

Renewal is where the price is really set

Software contracts renew automatically, often with a price uplift. The uplift is announced in an email that goes to whoever once registered the account — not necessarily to someone who reads it.

Two things make renewal the most important moment:

• It's when you can change the seat count. Miss the window and the number is locked for another year.
• It's when the supplier is most receptive. A customer who cancels is more expensive to replace than to give a discount to. That insight is the whole negotiation.

The notice period counts backwards from the renewal date, not forwards from when you start thinking about it. Thirty days is common, but ninety occurs.

What you can do yourself

This requires no negotiation and no tooling. Just someone setting aside a morning.

• Go through the bank or card statement and list every recurring software charge. Many find systems they didn't know existed.
• Compare paid seats against active users in each system. Almost all can show last login.
• Look for overlap using the table above as a starting point. Start with chat, file storage and meetings — that's usually where it sits.
• Check which tier you're on and which feature justifies it.
• Write down every renewal date and notice period in one place. It's the single most valuable list you can have in this category.
• Link offboarding to licence management. Removing a seat when someone leaves should be a routine, not a one-off effort.

What's hard to do yourself is knowing what you should be paying. Cloud prices are list prices, and the list price is rarely what larger customers actually pay. Discounts are negotiated individually, aren't published, and vary with volume and contract length. Without comparison data you can clear out what you don't use — but you can't judge whether the rest is reasonably priced.

Last reviewed 3 August 2026. The figures are based on negotiated contracts and quotes gathered for Swedish companies with 20–100 employees. They are typical ranges, not guarantees — your cost depends on volume, contract length and the requirements you set. We update them when we see the market has moved.

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