All five workflows
Use case 05 · IT & procurement

SaaS licence & spend optimisation

Half of purchased licences sit idle and renewals roll over. Join spend, login and contract data, then reclaim, downgrade and renegotiate.

Any company with 100+ staffTechAgenciesFinancial servicesMulti-site groups
The evidence

Why this workflow costs more than it should.

52.7%Share of purchased SaaS licences left unused (Zylo, 2025 SaaS Management Index)1
$4,830Average SaaS spend per employee, up 21.9% year on year1
66.5%Share of IT leaders hit by unexpected charges from usage-based or AI pricing1

The problem

Business teams buy software directly: Zylo finds they control 70% of SaaS spend, and IT only 26.1%1. Licences stay assigned to people who left or never logged in. Renewals roll over automatically, and new AI tools add usage-based bills nobody forecast. Zylo puts the average annual waste at $21M, although large enterprises skew that average1.

Market demand

MarketsandMarkets projects the SaaS management market to grow from USD 4.58B in 2025 to USD 9.37B by 2030 (15.4% CAGR)2. The growth is driven by AI licence optimisation, shadow-IT control and complex pricing2. The workflow needs read-only data only, so it is the fastest of the five to pilot.

Integration footprint

  • Identity: SSO login logs (e.g. Google Workspace, Microsoft Entra ID, Okta)
  • Spend: card feeds and AP or accounting data
  • Contracts: renewal dates and seat counts from the vendor portal or files
  • HR: leaver list to trigger licence reclaims
  • Read-only first: nothing is cancelled without approval
The workflow

Five steps, one human checkpoint.

The agent does the repetitive work. People decide the exceptions. Every action is logged against the baseline.

01 · DISCOVER

Build the inventory

Join spend, SSO and contract data into one list of apps with owners.

02 · MEASURE

Usage vs seats

Find idle, duplicate and over-tier licences, and overlapping tools.

03 · RECOMMEND

Costed actions

Reclaim, downgrade, consolidate or renegotiate, each with a dollar value.

04 · HUMAN CHECK

Owner approves

App owners confirm with one click in Slack, Teams or email.

05 · EXECUTE

Reclaim & watch

Remove seats, set renewal alerts 90 days out and monitor usage-based bills.

KPIs tracked from day oneSaaS spend per employeeLicence utilisationSavings realised (tracked against invoices)Renewals handled before auto-renew
The product

What your team works in.

One screen for the queue, the evidence and the decision. Exceptions come with the reason and a suggested action, so reviewing one takes seconds.

Product preview · sample data
The savings model

What it could be worth.

Market research model · based on published benchmarks

Company of 500 employees

Baseline uses Zylo's average spend per employee. Not every unused licence can be recovered because of contract terms and team-wide plans. The scenario therefore assumes only 10% of total spend is recovered, far below the 52.7% unused-licence rate.

Baseline 500 × $4,830$2.415M / yr
Scenario: recover 10% of spend$241,500 / yr
Data access neededRead-only
≈ $241k / yr
How to read this model. It uses the published benchmark as the baseline and states every assumption. Your own figure comes from measuring your workflow during the feasibility audit.

Sources

  1. 1
    Zylo, 2025 SaaS Management Index. zylo.com/news/2025-saas-management-index
  2. 2
    MarketsandMarkets, SaaS Management Market 2025–2030: USD 4.58B to USD 9.37B, 15.4% CAGR. marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/saas-management-market-215635254.html
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