How to Find Every Duplicate SaaS Subscription Your Team Is Paying For — Subrix

You're paying for Slack. So is your marketing department. So is the sales team.

That's three separate Slack workspaces, three billing cycles, three times the cost.

Nobody planned it that way. It just happened. Engineering set up one workspace for engineering. Marketing needed their own for confidential campaigns. Sales wants their own because they work with partners.

Now you're hemorrhaging money without realizing it.

This is SaaS sprawl, and it's wildly common. The average company with 20+ employees has between 50-100 SaaS tools. Somewhere in that list are duplicates you don't know about.

How much? Studies show companies waste $1,000-2,000 per employee per year on duplicate subscriptions.

If you have 50 employees, that's $50,000-100,000 a year in wasted money.

Most of it is accidental. And most of it is recoverable if you actually look for it.

Here's how to find it.

Why Duplicates Happen

1. Different teams, different decisions

Your finance person uses Expensify. Your HR person uses Concur. You need an expense platform, but now you have two.

Each seemed like the right choice at the time. Nobody compared notes.

2. Scale creates sprawl

When you had 3 people, one tool was enough. Now you have 15 people and two departments. The original tool doesn't scale. So instead of migrating everyone, someone else buys a second tool that "works better for our department."

Now you have two overlapping solutions.

3. SaaS vendors encourage multiple subscriptions

Slack charges per person per workspace. If you have 15 people and two workspaces, that's 30 person-seats instead of 15. They benefit. You lose.

4. Nobody is tracking it

If you don't have a centralized record of every tool and every subscription, you can't see the duplication.

You assume someone else is deduplicating. They assume the same.

The Audit: Finding Your Duplicates

You need three things: a list of tools, the cost per tool, and the users per tool.

Step 1: Get your credit card statements (Last 12 months)

Pull bank statements and credit card statements for the last year. Export them to a spreadsheet.

Look for:

Monthly recurring charges
Annual charges (often easier to miss because they only appear once)
Subscription services (search for keywords like "SaaS," "subscription," "monthly," "annual")

Create a column for:

Vendor name
Cost per month
Cost per year
Billing date
Credit card it's charged to

This is tedious but necessary. Most duplicate subscriptions hide because they're charged to different cards or departments.

Step 2: Ask each department lead

Send an email: "List every tool your team subscribes to, who's using it, and what it costs."

You'll get:

40% accurate information
40% forgotten tools (they remember the main ones but forget the $15/month tool someone signed up for once)
20% "I'm not sure who's paying for that"

This is normal. Humans are bad at remembering subscriptions.

Step 3: Check your SSO/Identity Provider logs

If you use Okta, Azure AD, or similar, they log every app people are signing into.

Go through your SSO logs and list every application. This catches tools people use that IT doesn't explicitly manage.

Step 4: Check IT's software asset inventory

IT has licensed software. Ask them for a list of every tool they manage or know about.

Step 5: Combine all three sources

Now you have three lists:

Credit card charges
Department reports
SSO logs
IT inventory

Where do they overlap? Those are confirmed duplicates.

If Slack appears in your credit card statement, three department reports, and IT inventory, it's definitely there.

If Slack appears in credit card statement and two different department names, you probably have two workspaces.

Identifying Duplicates

Look for tools that serve the same purpose:

Communication:

Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, Twist
(You probably have one primary choice and 1-2 secondary ones)

Project Management:

Asana, Monday.com, Jira, Notion, Trello, ClickUp
(Common to have one for engineering, one for general project management)

Expense Management:

Concur, Expensify, Ramp, Bill.com
(Different departments often pick different tools)

Time Tracking:

Harvest, Toggl, Clockify, Toggl Track
(Overkill to have more than one)

File Storage:

Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, Box
(Many companies pay for both Google Workspace and Dropbox)

Video Conferencing:

Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Webex
(Paying for multiple licenses when one would suffice)

The Math: Quantifying Your Waste

Create a duplicate summary:

|------|---------|-----------|-------|-------------------|---------------------|------------------|

| Slack | WS-Eng | WS-Sales | 30 | $500 | $300 | $3,600 |

| Project Mgmt | Asana | Monday | 20 | $400 | $280 | $3,360 |

| Expenses | Ramp | Expensify | 15 | $150 | $180 | $2,160 |

| File Storage | Google Drive | Dropbox | 50 | $600 | $800 | $9,600 |

That's the money you're leaving on the table.

Making the Consolidation Decision

For each duplicate, ask:

1. Can we consolidate?

- If both tools do the same thing, consolidate to one.

- Migrate data from the losing tool.

- Shut down the old subscription.

2. Do we actually need both?

- Sometimes teams genuinely need separate tools for security or workflow reasons.

- Usually, this is an excuse. One tool with proper permissions works fine.

3. What's the migration cost?

- Time to migrate data

- Time to retrain users

- Risk of disruption

- Usually, this cost is recovered within 3-6 months of savings.

4. Which tool should win?

- The one the majority of people use

- The one with better features for your core use case

- The one you're more likely to keep long-term

Consolidation: How to Actually Do It

Pick your primary tool. Export all data from the duplicate tool.

Set a sunset date. Tell teams you're consolidating on [Date]. Everyone needs to migrate by [Date - 1 week].

Provide migration support. Some teams will need help moving data and retraining.

Turn off the duplicate. On the sunset date, deactivate the old tool. Pause the subscription immediately.

Verify nothing broke. Check that workflows still work and nobody's using the old tool.

Celebrate the savings. Tell the company you just recovered $18,000 a year. Good work.

Ongoing Prevention

Once you've consolidated, prevent future sprawl:

1. Central tool approval process — New subscriptions must be approved by IT/Finance

2. Monthly subscription review — List every tool and its cost

3. Annual audit — Repeat this process once a year

4. Consolidation bias — Default to "can we use existing tools?" instead of buying new ones

The Real Impact

Most companies that do this audit find $15,000-40,000 in annual waste.

That's money that could go to:

Salaries
New hires
Better equipment
Actually investing in tools that matter

Or just profit.

Subrix automates this audit. See all your subscriptions in one place →

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How much duplicate software is your company paying for? Run a quick audit this week. You might be surprised.