Team Software and AI Subscriptions Keep Growing, So Which Ones Are Actually Used?

ChatGPT, Canva, Zoom, Notion, design apps, video editing apps, hosting, domains, a CRM. Each one looks cheap on its own. But the bills are spread across several people's credit cards, some are still in the name of employees who have left, and nobody knows the monthly total.

Subscriptions rarely balloon because of one big decision. Usually it's dozens of small decisions that never get reviewed.

Why costs creep up quietly

• Idle seats. An employee leaves, the account isn't removed, and the bill keeps running.
• Duplicate tools. Two AI chat subscriptions for the same work, or three note apps used by different teams.
• Prices rise when AI gets bundled in. Take Google Workspace. In January 2025, Google included Gemini features in its Business and Enterprise plans, and Business Standard customers now pay US$14 per user per month, US$2 more than before. That's fair if the features get used, but if they don't, it's a quiet increase.
• Auto-renewal. Annual plans that renew themselves even though nobody uses them anymore.

This isn't only a small-business problem. Zylo, a company that manages software subscriptions for large organizations, reported in its 2025 index that organizations waste an average of US$21 million a year on unused licenses, up 14.2% from the year before. Average SaaS spend was US$4,830 per employee. That's large-company scale, but the pattern is the same one mid-sized businesses run into.

An audit in one afternoon

You don't need special software to start. One sheet is enough:

1. Collect every subscription from credit card statements, bank statements, and invoice emails. Include those paid on personal cards and then reimbursed.
2. Fill in the table with columns like the ones below.
3. Check usage in each tool's admin page. Many team tools show when each user was last active.
4. Decide for each row: keep, reduce seats, downgrade the plan, merge with another tool, or cancel.
5. Move billing to company-owned accounts and cards, so nothing leaves with an employee.

The renewal date matters most. Set a reminder a month ahead so there's time to decide, the same way as managing domains and contracts in Domains, Contracts, and Permits Expire and Nobody Notices.

For AI subscriptions specifically

AI subscriptions have their own pattern, because they're priced per person and usage is very uneven.

• Match seats to usage. In ChatGPT Business, for example, there are Standard seats (US$20 per user per month billed annually, US$25 monthly) and Premium seats (US$100 annually, US$125 monthly) with much higher usage limits. The two can be mixed and reassigned between people. So the expensive seats only need to go to those who really use them heavily.
• Merge overlapping tools, carefully. Two AI services are sometimes used for genuinely different things.
• Stop paying for personal accounts. Besides being hard to control, work data in personal accounts falls under different privacy rules than a business plan, as I cover in Want to Summarize Your Company's Financial Data in ChatGPT? Is It Dangerous?.

Don't forget when someone leaves

Remove their seat on their last day, move important files and templates to company accounts, and log it in the offboarding checklist. How to do that is in A Simple SOP to Keep Company AI a Team Asset, Not Personal Property.

Sometimes a subscription is the right choice

The point of an audit isn't to cancel every subscription. Many tools are far cheaper to use than to build. What's worth calculating is the subscriptions that run for years for core needs you could own yourself, as I discuss in Instead of Stacking CRM and POS Subscriptions, Investing in Your Own Website Can Make More Sense.

Wrapping up

Do this audit once, then repeat it every six months. One sheet, one owner per tool, and a reminder before each renewal. Usually the result isn't just savings, but knowing exactly which accounts the company holds.

If you'd like to tidy up the list of subscriptions and access in your company, tell me which tools you use first.