TLDR: SaaS sprawl turns IT into vendor management, with every tool adding 5–15% annual cost increases and hidden integration overhead. Escaping requires ruthless consolidation, internal platforms for high-lock-in workflows, and dedicated engineering capacity, not more renewals and Band-Aid fixes.
When Your IT Team Becomes HR for Software
Your CFO forwards the Salesforce renewal. 12% increase. Again. You check Slack. HubSpot wants to “discuss your growth trajectory” before contract expiration. Translation: 15% bump or sign three more years at 8% annual increases.
Then your product manager messages you. “Found this amazing tool that solves our roadmap problem. Already signed the team up. Can you expense it?”
You open your SaaS management spreadsheet and count 87 separate platforms. When did you become a procurement officer?
The 5–15% Tax You Can’t Avoid
Here’s what nobody tells you when you go all-in on SaaS: every contract has a built-in price increase. Every single one, no exceptions.
The range is 5% if you’re lucky and 15% if you don’t have leverage. And the only leverage you have is signing a multi-year deal that locks you into smaller annual increases. Your options aren’t “increase or no increase.” They’re “big increase now” or “smaller increases locked in for three years.”
A CTO at a mid-sized company described it perfectly: “We are HR for SaaS platforms. We’re responsible for the employee lifecycle of that tool.” You’re doing onboarding, performance management, and offboarding, except these employees cost $50K to $500K per year and demand raises annually.
Do the math on 87 tools at a 10% average increase. That’s a structural cost explosion that compounds every year.
How You Built the Trap Yourself
You didn’t plan to manage 87 tools. Nobody does. It started reasonably. You needed CRM and bought Salesforce, then Jira for project management, Zendesk for support, and HubSpot for marketing. Each decision made sense at the time.
You bought instead of built so engineers could focus on core product. The pitch was compelling because it starts out true. Then two things happened.
First, the company grew. More teams meant more needs. Each team picked its own tools, Design chose Figma, Engineering picked DataDog, Sales wanted Gong. You can’t say no to everyone.
Second, shadow IT became trivial. Anyone with a credit card could add tools you don’t even know about. You’re only tracking what’s in procurement. How many tools live on laptops right now?
The real problem isn’t the number of tools. It’s the integration work, security reviews, compliance, vendor management, and renewals each one creates. That work scales exponentially.
The Escape Route Nobody Takes
You know what needs to happen: consolidate the sprawl, build custom integrations for critical workflows, and replace vendors where lock-in costs more than engineering time.
But you can’t. Your team is already managing 87 tools, firefighting broken integrations, and chasing the next shiny object leadership wants.
You need engineering capacity to reduce dependency on external engineering capacity. That’s the trap.
The companies that escape do three things: ruthlessly audit and kill 30% of unused tools, build internal platforms for high lock-in workflows, and staff a dedicated consolidation team—not product engineers squeezing it in between sprints.
You can’t fix infrastructure sprawl as a side project. It requires dedicated capacity.
Why This Gets Worse for Two Years
Even if you start today, expect 24 months before relief. Year one costs more. You pay twice, once for the SaaS you’re replacing and again for the engineers building replacements.
Year two brings savings as contracts expire, but you’re still managing 60+ tools while finishing consolidation. Meanwhile, every remaining tool keeps increasing 5–15% annually. A $2M SaaS budget becomes $2.2M, then $2.4M, then $2.6M. By the time consolidation finishes, you’ve paid over $1M in increases on tools you planned to kill.
Most companies never start because two years feels impossible. They accept the 87-tool trap, treat annual increases as the cost of business, hire more people to manage vendors, and wonder why tech spend grows faster than revenue.
The 87-Tool Trap framework, from Sonatafy’s Engineering Intelligence Hub. Practical tools for technical leaders facing SaaS sprawl, integration chaos, and budget constraints. Explore more at sonatafy.com/software-solution-directory.
