Introducing: Saasmanager — a tool that’ll help you save up to 30% on your SaaS spend.
Jasper here, founder of Saasmanager. In this blog, I‘ll tell you why we’ve built Saasmanager — saasmanager.io, a tool that’ll help you save up to 30% of your SaaS spend.
First of all, I’m from The Netherlands 🇳🇱. When you think of us Dutchies, you probably think of cheese, tulips, and Amsterdam. But there’s one thing the Dutch are most famous for: foreigners tend to think we’re quite greedy 😅.
The term ‘Going Dutch’ is a great example for this:
“‘Going Dutch’ is a term that indicates that each person participating in a paid activity covers their own expenses, rather than any one person in the group defraying the cost for the entire group.”
So now you know why Saasmanager was founded in The Netherlands… Let’s just say we don’t like paying more than we have to 😉.
Let me tell you about Saasmanager 👇
Most modern companies rely heavily on SaaS tools. After payrolling, SaaS costs are often the second biggest expense for startups, scaleups, and digital agencies.
Most companies spend over € 100 per employee per month on SaaS. For a company with 10 employees, that adds up to a minimum spend of € 12.000 per year. For a company with 20 employees, that’s € 24.000. A company with 40, € 48.000.
Okay — you get the point.
I can imagine that managing your SaaS spend isn’t your primary focus as a busy entrepreneur. These spendings are probably a relatively small part of your total costs and it’s not like it would double your revenue or anything.
🚨 But I can assure you: checking your SaaS spend is a really easy way to save serious money. All you have to do is put in a little bit of time.
Here are some classic examples of why you’re probably spending more than necessary on SaaS:
You’re still paying for unused seats — for a former employee or an employee who’d stopped using that application.
- You’re still paying for unused seats — either for a former employee or an employee who’s stopped using that application.
- You’ve signed up for or upgraded to a larger subscription than necessary.
- You’ve deprecated an application, but forgot to cancel your subscription (can be quite painful with annual subscriptions).
- You’ve signed up for a trial with your credit card, and were automatically upgraded to a paid, unwanted subscription (really annoying!).
🔬 Research shows that you can save up to 30% of your SaaS usage by killing off unused or underused subscriptions.
For a company with 10 employees, that’s € 3.600 per year; with 20 employees — € 7.200 per year; with 40 employees — € 14.400 per year. Once again, you get it 😉.
Okay, let’s dive in.
Using Saasmanager, there are three ways to save money.
1. Create an overview of all your software subscriptions
The first thing you’ll do in Saasmanager, is create an overview of all your software subscriptions.
A subscription added to Saasmanager will contain the following information:
- Application: e.g., Slack, Notion, Pitch.
- Subscription details: plan name, plan type, billing cycle, costs and renewal or expiry dates.
- Users: most subscriptions have you pay per seat/ employee. Fill out the colleagues who are using an application here.
- Owner: the colleague who has access to the business admin of an application. They can add/ delete users or downgrade or upgrade that subscription.
- Notes: optional — can contain any information you like.
You’ll create an overview like this:
❗ Warning: it will take some effort to create this overview, but saving money starts here. During this process, you’ll definitely find unused and underused seats/ subscriptions already.
A few tips to help you get started:
- Use your accounting tool, your bank statements, and the business admins of your applications to find the right subscription information.
- It can be helpful to invite team members who have access to the business admin of specific applications to Saasmanager. You’ll go further together!
- You’ll probably need some time to create this overview. Before you get started, get a cup of coffee, a beer or some snacks to keep you company 🙃
Let’s get started!
Once you’re finished… cheers! 🍻 It’ll get easier from here, I promise.
2. Get notified of renewals and expiries
Step two of the money-saving process is easy.
Right after you’ve created your subscription overview, you’ll find an overview of all your upcoming renewals and expiries. This way, you’ll never be late to cancelling or downgrading a subscription again.
Note: we’ll send renewal or expiry emails to the people who are marked as owners in the subscription overview.
In the future, we will implement integrations for these notifications, so you can receive them immediately via the tools you’re working with on a daily basis. A Slack #channel, Microsoft Teams or Todoist, for example.
3. Ask your teammates if they are still using your applications
The third part is where, according to us, most of the magic happens. As you might know, most applications charge a fee per seat/ user. A few examples:
- Google Workspace: € 10,40 per user per month
- Notion: $ 4 per user per month
- Adobe Creative Cloud: $ 52,99 per user per month
- Linear: $ 8 per user per month
To know whether the seats you’re paying for are still in use, you’ll have to check in with your colleagues once in a while.
That’s what we call ‘checkups’ 👀
Using Saasmanager, you can periodically send emails to your colleagues — e.g., once every four weeks, three months or six months. Whenever you send out a checkup, your colleagues will receive this email:
They’ll have to answer one simple question for every application for which they are registered as user:
“How often do you use these applications?”
They can answer never, rarely, monthly, weekly or daily per application.
After a week, your checkup will be marked as completed. You’ll find an overview of how often applications are being used on Saasmanager’s Checkup page.
That’s step three to saving your money 😉
In the above example, Airtable has two users who never use the tool. As Airtable charges $ 108 per user per year, you can instantly save $ 216 by cancelling subscriptions. You might be able to cancel the subscriptions of the colleagues who use it rarely as well, saving another $ 432 ($ 648 total). That’s easy money 😉.
That’s it 🏁
Saasmanager isn’t a fancy Web3 thing or design award winning product. It’s a straightforward tool that will help you save real money — up to 30% on your SaaS spend.
Interested in trying it out? Go to Saasmanager.io
About me
My name is Jasper van Elferen. With my cofounder Dimitri van Hees, I run an independent venture studio in the Netherlands. Our portfolio: Saasmanager, Apiwatch, Postcode API, Brouwtoren and De Basis. Want to read more stories like this? Follow me on Twitter.
