The Story of Forgotten Subscriptions & the Birth of Zluri

One Saturday evening, I got an email notification that I was charged $80 for an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription. I was beyond confused—I could not recollect when I had purchased it.

Digging deeper, I realized that I had bought it a year ago when I was all excited about dusting off my DSLR and wanting to edit pictures. That enthusiasm lasted a month, and then I forgot all about my subscription.

So I decided to look deeper into my emails and credit card statements and see how many subscriptions I was paying for and didn't use.

I was paying for 14 subscriptions, out of which I had not used 2 of them for the last two years—both video subscriptions similar to Netflix.

I've always prided myself on maintaining a perfect track record when it came to personal finance, and yet this happened to me.

I spoke to a few friends of mine, and everyone seemed to have had a similar experience with subscriptions but didn't bother to look for a solution. At best, they started documenting the subscriptions on a spreadsheet but never cared to update it.

One of my friends, however, had a different response. He said he was managing about 50 software subscriptions for his company of about 100 employees, and every other month there was some issue with their subscription record-keeping.

He searched online but couldn't find any reasonable solutions that could solve his problem. So, like everyone else, he too resorted to a spreadsheet.

This discovery piqued my curiosity, so I searched online for subscription management. The search results only led me to sites that helped me manage my business' recurring billing issues. That was not what I was looking for.

I tweaked my search to subscription monitoring/tracking, and I was able to find a few consumer apps. However, none popped up for mid-market or enterprise business use cases.

I wondered if I was searching the wrong way? Was this problem referred to in the industry in another way? With everything becoming a SaaS model of delivery, why isn't there a solution?

Then it hit me. What if I search for SaaS management?

Subscription Management -> Subscription Monitoring -> SaaS Management

It led me to a bunch of companies that aimed to solve this problem. But something was missing either in their product or their approach to the customers. It was not coming together.

That got me thinking. Did some SaaS deep dive in the context of mid-market and enterprise businesses?

Here are some of the points that were eye-opening for me.

SaaS Management is Vital for Mid-market/Enterprise' Scalability and Agility

More than 30% of the SaaS is wasted every year, confirms Gartner's research.That's based on current SaaS usage in mid-market and enterprise companies. With the SaaS model of software delivery only set to grow year after year, you can imagine the amount of money wastage that's waiting to happen.

An update: You can check how many apps you are paying for but not using with Zluri. Zluri helps you save money by eliminating your SaaS wastage in the form of unused apps, duplicate subscriptions, and abandoned apps. Get a demo!

Not to forget the compliance that needs to be taken care of when the company environment becomes SaaS-ified.

Is there a better solution? Can mid-market or enterprise customers have an alternative? Every data point on the internet lead me to only three conclusive points:

1. The market for SaaS is still in its infancy. Every business function will have to adopt numerous SaaS applications to scale their operations in the next 3-7 years, if not sooner.
2. Running a tight ship on security and compliance in a SaaS-ified environment will be a massive challenge for IT teams soon.

If the above is conclusive, then as a first step, an effective SaaS management tool becomes a must-have in all organizations. Simply put, having a SaaS management tool is like having a meter for your electricity usage.

Meet my Co-founders: The magic of Three

I reached out to 2 of my friends—Ritish and Chaithanya, and this idea resonated with them. We spoke at length between us and to our friends and prospective buyers about this idea.

Every single one of them was interested in the SaaS management software idea. After a few late-night conversations and a clear path as to how we planned to address this for the long term, we decided to start-up. And so, Zluri was born.

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