Tales from the Crypt: Your Software Subscriptions Have Vampires and Zombies

The Numbers Behind the Problem

A company with 20 to 50 employees spends an average of $4,330 per person per year on software ^[1]. For companies in the 50 to 100 staff range, that drops to $2,583 per person ^[1]. The smaller the company, the more you're spending per head, because individual subscriptions, duplicate tools, and the absence of volume pricing hit harder at that scale.

And most organisations don't even know the full extent of it. Businesses consistently underestimate their software usage by an average of 40%, meaning for every 10 tools a company thinks it's using, there are actually 14 ^[1]. No dedicated IT department. No software asset management. No one whose job it is to review what subscriptions and services the company is paying for.

Subscription spending drifts. It's almost never intentional. It's just unattended.

Why Good Businesses Miss It

This isn't about negligence. Most businesses we've worked with are well-run, with competent people managing budgets and making considered decisions. The subscription spend leaks through for three reasons.

The purchasing is decentralised. The majority of subscription spending now happens outside of IT. Marketing buys its own tools. Operations buys its own tools. Sales buys its own tools. Nobody has a view across all of it.

The expenses are mis-coded. A project management platform gets coded as a marketing expense. Microsoft 365 licences for field staff get coded to cost of goods sold. These costs slip through because they're categorised as operational expenses, not software.

Nobody has the right skills looking at it. A financial review will catch duplicate line items and unusual spikes. But it won't catch that you're paying for Business Premium when Standard would do, or that your Adobe Creative Cloud licences include features nobody uses, or that the "enterprise" tier you signed up for three years ago now costs 40% more than the plan that would actually fit. That takes someone who's spent years deep in the technology stack and knows what to look for and where.

Three Tales from the Crypt

The names and details are generalised, but every one of these is real.

Vampire Subscriptions: The Monday.com Cycle

A new director of marketing is hired to shake things up. They come in with energy, ideas, and strong preferences about how their team should work. They're used to Monday.com, so Monday.com it is.

Your company is already paying for a similar project management tool. Maybe Asana, maybe Basecamp, maybe something built into your Microsoft 365 licence. But nobody turns it off. Nobody adjusts the licensing. It just sits there.

Monday.com gets deployed. The team signs up for an annual subscription that needs to be trued up once a year. Eighteen months later, the director moves on. The team gets dispersed. Monday.com now joins the list of vampires. It auto-renews. The annual invoice keeps getting paid. Nobody questions it because it's coded as a marketing expense, not an IT cost.

A new director gets hired. They prefer a different tool. The cycle starts again. We've seen organisations with multiple layers of this, each leadership change leaving behind another subscription that nobody owns, nobody uses, and nobody cancels.

Zombie Licences: 50 Licences, 10 Staff

A construction company hires a new project manager who prefers Microsoft 365. They migrate the entire company over from Google Workspace, with the idea that all employees, including hourly field staff with no computer, should have an email address. So everyone gets a licence.

Things get busy. The field staff never get onboarded. They never log in. They never use the licences. But the licences are there, active, renewing month after month.

The project manager leaves a year later. The licences keep auto-renewing for another couple of years. Fifty licences. Ten people actually using them. Nobody notices because accounting just pays the bill. The licences were categorised as cost of goods sold for a multi-year project. They never appeared in any software subscription or cloud services review. Ever.

Shadow IT: Everyone's Got Their Own Adobe

A small company. No more than one or two people per department. No IT department. Aside from Google Workspace, everyone purchases their own software on their personal credit card and submits it as an expense to be reimbursed.

Everyone has their own individual licence for Adobe (because everyone thinks you need an Adobe licence to view a PDF). Everyone has Microsoft 365 Personal (because everyone wants Outlook, Excel, Word, and PowerPoint). Everyone has their own Claude subscription. A couple of people have Figma. Someone has Canva Pro. Someone else has a niche tool they found on Product Hunt two years ago.

Some are purchased in USD on a CAD credit card. Some in CAD on a USD credit card. Some are monthly. Some are annual. The foreign exchange fees alone are a slow bleed. The company is missing out on volume licensing discounts. The bookkeeping overhead of processing dozens of individual monthly line items adds up. And the governance question nobody is asking: when every employee is signing up for their own tools with their own accounts, where is your data?

Shadow IT has been a known problem for years. But shadow AI has made it dramatically worse. According to Microsoft's WorkLab research, 78% of AI users are bringing their own tools to work ^[2], and 73.8% of ChatGPT usage at work happens through non-corporate accounts with no guardrails ^[3]. Most employees don't realise that a comparable AI capability may already be included in the Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace licence the company is already paying for. It's the Monday.com cycle all over again, just with AI tools and moving faster.

In many cases, the fix is straightforward once someone actually looks. The hard part is never the fix. It is knowing where to look.

What to Look For

After 30 years working across the technology stack, I've developed an eye for patterns that repeat across almost every organisation:

• Vampire subscriptions. Tools that auto-renew long after the person who signed up has left. Coded to the wrong department. Invisible to IT.
• Zombie licences. Seats provisioned for people who never logged in, or who left the company months ago. Still active. Still billing.
• Wrong tier. Business Premium when Standard would do. Enterprise E5 when E3 covers everything you need. The "just in case" upgrade that nobody revisits.
• Legacy contracts. Vendor agreements signed years ago that haven't been renegotiated, even though the market has moved.
• Mis-coded expenses. Subscription spend buried in marketing, operations, professional development, or cost of goods sold. Every one of the stories in this article involves subscription spend that was invisible because it was categorised as something else.

The reason these things persist isn't incompetence. It's that nobody with the right combination of financial awareness and deep technical knowledge is looking at the full picture. A CPA will catch the financial anomalies. A tech consultant will catch the licensing misalignments. Most businesses don't have either one doing a comprehensive software subscription and cloud services review, let alone both working together.

That's the gap. And it's where the 10 to 30 percent lives.

Something to Think About

We recently reviewed a five-person SaaS company and found just under 25% savings on their monthly spend, consisting of mostly unused licences and services and subscriptions purchased in the wrong currency on mismatched credit cards. A 30-person company at $4,330 per head is spending roughly $130,000 a year on software. At 10 to 30 percent, that's $13,000 to $39,000 back in the budget.

If your software and service subscriptions haven't been reviewed by someone who knows what to look for and where, you're almost certainly leaving money on the table. Or, as Morgan Tate put it, you might be lighting it on fire ^[4].

Get in touch if any of this sounds familiar.