How I Organise the SaaS Subscription Stack for a Small Consulting Team

At the end of last quarter, I stopped mid-task while pulling up invoices for our team's shared accounts. Notion, Slack, Miro, Loom, Zoom, Calendly, HubSpot, Airtable — £870 per month combined. I suspected it was excessive for a four-person team, but seeing the actual figures was another thing entirely. The problem wasn't that it was "expensive" — it was that things overlapped. We were posting content on a Miro board, then reorganising it in Notion, and running an Airtable tracker alongside a HubSpot pipeline.

Here's the audit routine I started using from that point on.

Lay Out Your Entire Stack on One Page

All you need is a single spreadsheet. Five columns: tool name, monthly cost, primary user (team member initials), core purpose, and whether it's replaceable. I expected it to take 30 minutes to fill in, but it took over an hour. I had to dig through email inboxes to work out who was subscribed to which plan.

One tip: if payments through the team email account are mixed in with ones charged to personal cards and then expensed, things will slip through the cracks. I filtered our bank statement CSV by "subscription" and key vendor names to catch the missing items.

Map Out Feature Overlap

Once the spreadsheet is complete, group everything by the "core purpose" column. In my case, four main clusters emerged.

• Project management and documentation
• Client communication and scheduling
• CRM and pipeline tracking
• Visual assets and workshop collaboration

If there are two or more tools in a single cluster, they're candidates. I listed the overlapping features between Miro and Notion — kanban boards, timeline views — and checked how many times I'd opened a Miro board in the past 60 days. The answer was three. It had only been used for a single client workshop.

Two Questions to Ask Before You Cut

Before dropping a tool, I always check the following.

• Does this tool have a unique feature, or can the tools we're keeping cover 90% or more of what it does?
• If we cut this tool, will it actually break any team member's workflow?

The second question matters more. A colleague at the Glasgow office was using Loom every week for client briefings, but since I barely used it, I nearly wrote it off as something we could cut. That's context I would have missed if I hadn't asked directly.

After the Cleanup

It took two days to cancel Miro and migrate Airtable to Notion databases — less of a migration, more of a restructure of existing Airtable views inside Notion. Monthly costs dropped from £870 to around £580. The £290 difference isn't revolutionary, but the real benefit is that the question "Where does this data live?" comes up far less often.

I repeat this audit every quarter. I don't always end up cutting something — I also use it to decide when it's time to add a new tool. When you can see your stack clearly, decisions come faster.