NorthBeam Agency is a 14-person performance marketing shop in Austin. In late 2024, Head of Operations Sara Lopez ran a structured six-week SaaS audit that cut the agency's monthly software bill from $4,100 to $1,180 — a 71% reduction with no impact on client work or team productivity. SaaSTweaks asked Sara to walk through how she did it.
What triggered the audit
Q: Why audit at all?
A: Two reasons collided. We had just lost a retainer client at the end of Q3 — about 12% of our annual revenue. The founders asked me to find a way to extend runway without touching headcount. At the same time, I had been quietly horrified by the SaaS line in our P&L for months. Forty-one hundred a month is forty-nine grand a year. For a 14-person agency, that was punching above the salary cost of a junior strategist. The audit became a forcing function.
Q: How did you set the baseline?
A: I pulled the bank statement and the credit card statement for the prior six months. I found 47 distinct software charges. The accounting system had categorised about 30 of them as "Software." The other 17 were buried under "Office Expenses," "Subscriptions," and one heroic line called "Misc — Ali knows." That is the first finding of every SaaS audit: you have more tools than your finance system thinks you do.
The framework
Q: Walk through the six weeks.
A: One sub-goal per week.
- Week 1 — Inventory. List every paid tool with monthly cost, contract terms, renewal date, and the named owner inside the company. If no owner steps forward, that becomes finding number one.
- Week 2 — Usage. Pull last-30-day active-user data from each tool. Many vendors expose this in admin panels; for the ones that do not, ask the rep. Mark anything below 30% active utilisation.
- Week 3 — Overlap. Group tools by job-to-be-done. Where multiple tools do the same job, pick one to keep. We had three different file-storage tools and two project trackers.
- Week 4 — Negotiation. For tools we kept, contact every vendor with a renewal proposal. Anchor on usage data and competitive alternatives.
- Week 5 — Cuts. Cancel the bottom of the list. Notify users 5 business days before any cancellation actually happens so workflows can shift.
- Week 6 — New baseline. Re-pull the bank statement. Confirm the savings. Document the new stack and post it to Notion so nobody re-buys what we cut.
Q: What did the numbers look like by category?
A: Roughly:
- Project management and collaboration: $640 → $180. Cut Asana and Monday, kept ClickUp on the team plan.
- Sales and outbound: $890 → $0. Killed the entire category. We are not an outbound shop. The tools were a holdover from a brief experiment in 2023.
- Analytics and reporting: $720 → $190. Consolidated three dashboards into one Databox account; killed two single-purpose tools.
- Design and creative: $560 → $310. Renegotiated Figma down a tier, kept Adobe.
- Communications: $480 → $260. Switched Slack to a different plan tier and consolidated three video tools to Loom only.
- Storage and files: $310 → $0. Cancelled Dropbox Business; standardised on Google Drive.
- Misc / one-off: $500 → $240. Cut six tools nobody owned; kept three that had genuine use.
Sara's 30% rule: any tool with under 30% of paid seats actively used in the last 30 days is a cancellation candidate by default. The owner of the tool has to explicitly defend why those quiet seats should keep being paid for.
Surprises along the way
Q: What surprised you about what survived?
A: Two things. First, the tools that the team genuinely loved survived even when they were not the cheapest in their category. Loom is more expensive than the alternatives we evaluated. We kept it because every member of the team uses it weekly. Second, ClickUp survived against my expectation. I assumed we would consolidate to Notion. The strategists pushed back hard — they live in ClickUp views I had never used. I learned that the audit is not just about cost; it is about which tools the team will revolt over losing.
Q: What got cut that surprised people?
A: A subscription to a competitor research tool that one of the founders had bought three years ago and that nobody had logged into in 14 months. $240/month. When I sent the cancellation notice, four different people emailed asking if we still had it. None of those four had ever logged in. That is the strongest signal you will ever get that a tool is not real to your team.
Q: How did vendors respond to the renewal conversations?
A: Better than I expected. Of the eight vendors I contacted with renewal proposals, six offered material concessions. Two flat-out refused — we cancelled both. The conversations went best when I led with our actual usage data. "We have 14 paid seats. Six have logged in this month. Here is what we would pay for an honest accounting of our usage." That framing converts a price negotiation into a structural conversation that vendors can defend internally.
What happened after
Q: Six months in, did the audit hold?
A: The bill is now $1,290. So we have crept up by about $110/month over six months — mostly because we added one Webflow seat for a new client and upgraded one ClickUp seat. Both were justified additions. We have a quarterly mini-audit on the calendar to keep it from drifting again. The principle is: the bill grows when there is a reason and shrinks at every renewal cycle. It does not just grow.
Q: How did the team react?
A: Mixed at first. The strategists pushed back on losing tools they used. The designers pushed back on the Figma tier change. We mitigated by shipping a printed "what changed" memo on day one of week five and holding a 30-minute team Q&A. After about two weeks the new stack felt normal. Six months in, nobody mentions the old tools.
Q: What would you tell another agency considering this?
A: Three things. One, do it as a structured project with a deadline, not as a "we should look at this." A six-week sprint with a named owner is the difference between a finished audit and a perpetual to-do. Two, talk to vendors before cancelling. Most will offer concessions you would not have asked for. Three, document the new stack publicly inside the company. Post the list to Notion or your wiki. Otherwise the same tools you cut get re-bought within six months by people who do not know they were cut.
Q: What is the next audit?
A: We are running the same framework on agency vendor spend now — design contractors, ad spend management fees, analytics consultants. Same six-week shape, same questions. I expect the savings to be smaller in absolute terms but the discipline matters more than the dollars at this stage.
NorthBeam's redacted audit template is something Sara is open to sharing with other agency operations leads on request.