The real cost of unused software seats in a 20 person company
A worked example of how a 20 person company quietly loses $1,800 a month to seats nobody logs into, and how to find it.
Software waste is rarely one big embarrassing invoice. It is twenty small ones, each too small to argue about, each renewing on a different day of the month. Here is what that looks like with real numbers.
The starting picture
Take a 20 person company: eight in engineering, five in sales, three in marketing, two in operations, two founders. A typical stack looks like this:
- Google Workspace, 20 seats at $12, so $240 a month
- Slack Pro, 20 seats at $8.75, so $175 a month
- A CRM, 5 seats at $80, so $400 a month
- Design tools, 6 seats at $15, so $90 a month
- Project tracker, 20 seats at $10, so $200 a month
- Cloud hosting, roughly $600 a month
- Analytics, error tracking, transactional email and support desk, roughly $450 a month
- Two AI tools bought by different people, roughly $300 a month
That is about $2,455 a month, or $29,460 a year.
Where the money leaks
Four leaks show up in almost every company we look at, and none of them require anyone to have done anything wrong.
- Leavers. Two people left in the last six months and their seats were never removed. On five tools each, at an average $22 a seat, that is $220 a month.
- Bought and forgotten. Someone trialled a tool, put it on the company card, and moved on. Two of those at $150 is $300 a month.
- Overbought tiers. The CRM is on a plan sized for a sales team of ten. Right sizing it saves $240 a month.
- Duplicates. Two AI subscriptions doing the same job. Cutting one saves $150 a month.
That is $910 a month, or about $11,000 a year, in a company of twenty people. In companies with heavier tooling we routinely see double that.
Why it stays hidden
The card statement shows a vendor name and an amount. It does not show how many seats you paid for, how many of those seats logged in last month, whether the charge covered one month or twelve, or that two lines are the same product bought twice. So the review gets postponed, and postponed again.
How to find it this week
- Start from receipts, not the bank feed. Every invoice states the seat count, the period and the exact amount.
- List every recurring charge with its renewal date, so you know what decision is due next.
- For each tool, compare seats paid for against people who actually use it.
- Cancel the duplicates first, right size the tiers next, then remove the leaver seats.
This is the job Submole does automatically. It reads the billing emails already sitting in your inbox, builds the list with the exact amounts printed on each invoice, flags the idle seats, and gives you a cancel link for each vendor. One found tool usually pays for the whole subscription.