5 Ways for SaaS Cost Optimization During Recession

One of the best ways to make your organization future-ready is to get the most out of your SaaS investments in your business. It will help the organization face potential risks, adapt to the new technological environment to compete, and more.

However, managing SaaS spending in the organization takes a lot of work, leading to havoc in cash flow. Nevertheless, you can optimize your organization's SaaS cost in a few practical ways. Here's a quick guide.

Due to the increased purchasing of Saas applications, it is becoming time-consuming to evaluate the organization's existing software and determine how it can be used effectively. This results in a need for more visibility into the SaaS stack, and businesses continue to make wasteful purchases, increasing SaaS expenses.

Furthermore, businesses purchase software at the last minute when they realize its need. So instead of being aware of all the SaaS apps in their stack, they can use, they end up making purchases on the spot to meet an immediate need.

Subscribing only to the app they need immediately, without considering its long-term viability, starts a terrible \"counter-productive\" cycle. So, to overcome these challenges, organizations must focus on cost reduction to streamline business processes.

Before proceeding toward practical ways to optimize SaaS costs. Let's first discuss some of the benefits of software cost reduction that will help your businesses, including:

• Businesses will get the opportunity to invest in other effective existing SaaS app alternatives to increase productivity.
• It will help your business to maximize investment in technology.
• Businesses can reallocate the savings to a financial buffer which will help organizations to prepare for unforeseen catastrophes.
• Additionally, with SaaS cost reduction, businesses can avoid cutting budgets in other areas or even laying off employees. It helps them to optimize their SaaS investments systematically.

In this post, we will discuss how you can optimize SaaS costs.

Effective Ways to Optimize SaaS Cost During Recession

Let's discuss the five practical ways to help you get the most out of your SaaS spending.

1. Discover your SaaS infrastructure

The first step in SaaS cost management is to identify and view all the SaaS tools currently available in the SaaS stack. With a centralized system, you can help track and analyze all the IT tasks, such as which apps are being used, the respective app users and their departments, estimated budget, actual spend, and more.

Additionally, you can view the payment methods made by the IT teams or employees, such as the payment made by individual corporate credit cards, purchasing cards, and employee expense reports.

So, SaaS cost optimization starts with SaaS discovery. It involves discovering SaaS apps that are being used (or not) across the organization and identifying cost optimization opportunities. Then, organizations can opt for effective SaaS platforms such as Zluri to optimize SaaS costs.

Zluri is a SaaS management platform that helps you gain visibility into your SaaS stack and discovers 100% of your apps. It uses five discovery methods to discover all the apps in your organization: SSO or IDP, Direct integrations through APIs, Financial management systems, browser extensions, and desktop agents.

Further, it gives you a centralized dashboard to track and control the SaaS landscape of your organization.

2. Check on redundant or duplicate applications

When organizations purchase multiple SaaS apps, they fail to keep track of them, leading to duplicate apps. Due to this, IT teams have to spend a lot of time to figure out which apps have overlapping features.

For example, if you use both Trello and Asana for project management in your organization. It is a budget and time waste to navigate between these two applications. Since both tools serve the same purpose, you can use any one to meet your goal. This will save you money and time because you don't have to switch between the two apps.

An organization can encourage departments to agree on using the same application that serves multiple functions that will help in saving SaaS costs and IT resources.

With Zluri, you can discover all the SaaS applications present in your organization with the help of discovery methods. Allowing IT teams to identify apps that are not being used and applications with duplicate features, they can remove these applications and save on cost.

3. Be proactive with your auto-renewals

Today, signing up for any SaaS app has become more accessible. You have to enter your credit card information, and you can start using the app. However, most SaaS apps have auto-renewal, due to which employees forget to cancel their subscriptions after using an app and jump to a new app. This causes IT teams to pay for licenses they no longer need or use.

For example- an employee is using Quillbot, which is not approved by IT teams, and the employee made the payment for the subscription with the company's card. The IT team is not aware of such applications being used, but every month the payment has been made for the subscription. Leading to unnecessary SaaS expenses, which impacts the overall organization budget.

Businesses must keep track of renewals and accordingly decide whether to continue with the licenses or cancel them. This will help the organization save SaaS spend and utilize it to purchase other licenses, increasing productivity.

Furthermore, the IT teams must ensure they know the cancellation dates well. If you are unaware of the renewal dates, you might pay an extra subscription fee for it, even though you might not need it.

With Zluri, you can get updates on upcoming renewals with the help of a renewal calendar. Before proceeding with the payment, you can make decisions to continue with the subscriptions and contracts or cancel them by identifying the app usage per user.

You can prioritize the renewals as per the requirement and manually set alerts at your convenience. By default, you will get alerts for contracts 30, 15, 7, and 1 days before renewal, and for payments, you get 7 and 1 days before renewal.

4. Downgrade licenses to suitable tiers

The organization must carefully assess the users' requirements and decide which SaaS applications they need. For example, sometimes employees might only require access to some of the software features, and on the other hand, some employees might need complete access to all features as per their role. So, before procuring an app, you should carefully consider your users and what features they need.

When the companies overestimate their requirements, they procure high-tier apps. But if the companies know their employees' usage before the renewals, they can downgrade to suitable tiers.

For example, if your organization uses zoom for video conferencing and cloud recording, with premium licenses, it gives you translation services. However, if your organization no longer does business across language barriers, you don't require real-time translation in your zoom meeting. So, you can choose a lower plan with no translation features that will help you minimize costs.

However, rightsizing SaaS subscriptions is not always easy, and not all unused features may be canceled outright. The most effective SaaS management solution will streamline the process of downgrading subscription levels.

With Zluri, you can identify which Saas applications are used the most and the least. Based on that, you can analyze which app features are frequently used. Accordingly, you can downsize to suitable tiers. In addition, Zluri helps to identify extra features of SaaS apps that employees do not use, and you can eliminate those apps or opt for a better alternative.

5. Make a better price negotiation with SaaS supplier/vendor

Setting up the context and goal of negotiations with vendors to cut costs may lead to a more cooperative and flexible negotiation approach. If you have set up a plan to cut costs, make sure any SaaS vendors who are part of the plan know about it. It shows that cost-cutting measures are being taken across the supplier inventory and that all vendors are being looked at.

Most of the time, vendors put out business or enterprise software with optional features. So please list the product requirements or support options you don't need and try eliminating them from the contract. Also, when you buy the products, plan for more licenses simultaneously, so you have a growth plan, and the vendor doesn't charge you retail prices when you need a new license.

If you are ready to sign longer-term agreements, most SaaS providers will reduce their pricing in exchange for your business. Maintaining an existing subscriber is far more cost-effective for them than acquiring a new one.

SaaS providers like long-term contracts because they give them a better idea of how much money they will make. Terms can be as short as a few months or as long as a few years. Limiting the commitment to one or two years might be best if you don't know how your needs will change. After committing for three to five years, discounts can become very appealing.

With Zluri, you can get the best deal for your SaaS applications. We have experts who can ensure that both you and the vendor get what they want from the contract. We work as an extension of your procurement team. We negotiate with 1 billion SaaS transaction data and determine reasonable prices for SaaS buying conversations.

We can help you acquire SaaS and handle the associated negotiations. Consequently, it will save you both time and money. Also, the benchmark data makes it easier for us to figure out what prices are fair and how to negotiate in the best way so that no one loses.