SaaS Spend Calculator

How the SaaS Spend Calculator Works

Most firms know what any one subscription costs and have no idea what all of them cost together. The invoices land in different months, on different cards, approved by different people. This calculator puts them in one place so you can see the total the way a vendor sees it: as a number that renews every year and goes up.

The inputs

Employees with software seats is the headcount that actually gets logins, not total staff. Per-seat tools is how many subscriptions charge you for each of those people. If you are not sure, count the ones on your last credit card statement; eight is a normal answer for a firm of fifty. Average price per seat is a blended figure across those tools. Flat-rate subscriptions covers everything priced by plan instead of by user: accounting, estimating, marketing platforms, hosting, and the like.

The math

Per-seat spend is employees times tools times the average seat price. Flat-rate subscriptions are added on top for the monthly total, and the annual figure is that times twelve. The three-year and five-year totals apply the annual price increase you set to each year in turn, so year two costs more than year one and year three more than year two. The default is 8%, editable. SaaS price increases at renewal have been running well ahead of general inflation, so adjust it to what you have actually seen on your own renewals.

The unused-seat figure applies your percentage to the per-seat portion only, since flat-rate plans do not go to waste one seat at a time. Twenty percent is a conservative default: former employees still on the roster, duplicate tools doing the same job in two departments, and licenses bought for a project that ended.

What to do with the number

The five-year total is the one to sit with. It is the price of renting your operations from vendors who set the terms, and it is usually larger than a firm would ever approve as a single line item. Not every tool in it should be replaced. Commodity software (email, payroll, file storage) is almost always cheaper to rent. The question is which subscriptions sit in the middle of your core workflow, because those are the ones where the cost above is only part of the bill. The build vs buy calculator takes that next step.