The headline number from 2026 benchmark data: organisations are wasting an average of $19.8 million per year on unused SaaS licenses. That figure is actually an improvement — down 5.3% from $20.9 million in 2025. But the improvement isn't from real consolidation. It's from governance pressure. Total SaaS spend is up 21.9% year on year, now averaging $4,830 per employee. Teams are spending more and wasting slightly less of it. That's not a victory.
What the data shows on spend by company size#
Companies with 75 to 199 employees are running an average of 44 SaaS tools. At 1,500 to 4,999 employees, that number climbs to 101 tools. Large enterprises above 5,000 employees average 131 tools. The spend scales accordingly: large enterprises average $284 million annually on SaaS, while SMBs in the 1 to 500 employee range spend an average of $11.5 million. For most Indian B2B SaaS companies in our target segment — 10 to 50 employees — the tool count sits in the 20 to 44 range, but the ratio of spend-to-output is often worse than larger companies because there's less operational maturity managing it.
On license utilization#
The headline improvement: license utilization reached 54% in 2025, up from 47% in 2024. That still means 46% of what teams are paying for sits idle. Roughly half of all SaaS licenses go unused for 90 days or more. The utilization problem isn't laziness — it's that tools get bought for a specific campaign or initiative, that initiative ends, and the subscription auto-renews indefinitely while the login sits dormant.
Two-thirds of IT leaders reported unexpected SaaS charges from consumption-based or AI-layer pricing in 2025. As more tools layer AI on top of base subscriptions, the variable cost component becomes harder to predict and easier to overpay.
On portfolio compression#
The average company used 106 SaaS apps in 2024 — down from 112 in 2023, a 5% decrease. Mid-sized companies saw an 18% reduction in app count over two years. The direction is consolidation. The pace is too slow for the efficiency gains to show up in the P&L.
The consolidation impulse is structural now. 84% of sales and marketing teams without an all-in-one platform say they plan to consolidate. 70% or more of organisations will centralise SaaS management via a platform layer by 2028, up from under 30% today. The window to be the platform teams consolidate onto — rather than the tool that gets consolidated away — is open now and narrowing.
What this means#
The era of buying one more tool to fix the last one is ending. CFOs are running stack audits. Procurement is asking harder questions. The competitive advantage in 2026 and 2027 isn't adding capabilities through new tools — it's architecting fewer, better-connected ones that compound instead of fragment.