Cobalt Marketing cut SaaS spend 47% in one quarter

Cobalt Marketing entered Q3 2024 carrying a $5,580/month SaaS bill across a 12-person team. The agency had grown from four to twelve people in 18 months and had never paused to consolidate the tooling that came with each new hire. The leadership team set a target: cut the monthly bill by 40% before the end of the quarter without firing anyone or losing a single client deliverable.

The audit surfaced 38 active subscriptions across the company credit card and three personal cards billed back to the agency. Eleven of those tools had not been opened by anyone in 60 days. Six categories had at least two competing tools — most notably project management (Asana and Monday side by side) and analytics (a custom Looker setup, a Databox account, and a third dashboard tool nobody could name an owner for). Annualised, the duplicates alone represented $14,800 in spend with no incremental output.

Cobalt's ops lead ran a 4-week consolidation sprint with three principles. First, every tool must have a named owner who logs in weekly; orphan tools get cancelled. Second, where two tools cover the same job, the one with deeper team adoption wins regardless of price. Third, every annual contract gets a renewal-negotiation conversation with documented usage data 30 days before renewal.

Week one: full inventory and usage pull. The team built a single Notion table with 38 rows and four columns — tool, monthly cost, named owner, last-30-day active seats. Eleven rows had no owner; those went on a kill-list pending sign-off from the founders.

Week two: category consolidation. Asana was cancelled in favour of ClickUp, where the strategists already lived. The custom Looker setup was retired in favour of Databox, which a single ops person could maintain. Three separate file-storage accounts were migrated into the existing Google Workspace Drive. A standalone time-tracker was retired because ClickUp time-tracking covered the use case for the four people who actually needed it.

Week three: vendor negotiations. The ops lead contacted six remaining vendors with a one-paragraph email containing the actual seat-utilisation numbers and a target price. Four vendors agreed to material concessions: Brand24 dropped the monthly rate by 22% on a one-year commitment, ClickUp added two free seats and a 15% reduction, the email-marketing platform offered a 30% renewal discount, and the design tool granted a free upgrade tier.

Week four: cancellations executed, new stack documented, and a printed memo distributed to every team member explaining what changed and why. A 30-minute Q&A let people raise objections; two tools came back from the kill-list because a quiet but real workflow surfaced.

By the end of Q3, monthly SaaS spend had dropped from $5,580 to $2,960 — a 47% reduction, exceeding the 40% target. Annualised, that represents $31,440 in recovered budget. The agency redirected the savings into a contract content strategist and an additional ad-spend testing budget, both decisions the founders had previously deferred.

Beyond the headline number, the audit produced three follow-on outcomes. First, the average tool now has 78% active-seat utilisation versus 41% before the audit — meaning the team actually uses what the agency pays for. Second, the renewal calendar built during the audit has triggered four additional negotiations in the six months since, recovering another $4,200 annualised. Third, two clients explicitly cited Cobalt's new "lean stack" methodology as a reason for retainer renewal — the discipline became a marketing asset.

The agency now runs a quarterly mini-audit on the same Notion template. The bill has crept up by $310/month over six months — all of which represents tools added with explicit business justification, none of which represents drift.