Part 2 of The Hidden Margin Framework: Tool Sprawl
Last week I wrote about infrastructure waste.
This week: subscriptions.
When I start working with a company, I don’t begin with architecture diagrams.
I ask the CFO or accounting for the last 12 months of company credit card subscriptions.
That alone usually reveals where hidden margin is hiding.
What I typically find:
- Datadog (or similar) full APM + logs + RUM for a product that only needs basic uptime monitoring
- Google Workspace Enterprise for the entire company when Business Standard would be more than enough
- Enterprise GitHub / GitLab seats for inactive users or teams that qualify for free tiers
- Premium CI minutes wasted on inefficient pipelines
- Multi-region storage replication nobody can justify
- Separate BI platforms solving the same problem
- Paid staging/testing environments running 24/7 with near-zero usage
- Enterprise CDN tiers for modest traffic volumes
Individually, none of these look dramatic.
Collectively, they quietly add 5–15% to annual burn.
No migration required.
No rewrite required.
No layoffs required.
Just visibility and discipline.
Most companies review revenue weekly.
Very few review subscriptions with the same rigor.
When was the last time you looked at your company credit card subscriptions and asked whether they still make sense for the size and actual needs of the business?
If you’d like to review your tool stack through this lens, you can book time here: