01
Reconcile licensed seats against single sign-on activity
Idle seats are the largest and easiest recovery, and nobody in the organisation owns them.
Business playbook · 9 tactics
9 Ways to Cut Software and Cloud Spend
Most of the waste is structural, not extravagant.
02
List applications by function to find real overlaps
Three tools doing the same job usually arrived through three different teams over three years.
03
Audit cloud egress separately from compute
Bandwidth scales with traffic rather than architecture, so it grows exactly when the bill is least welcome.
04
Kill non-production environments on a schedule
Forgotten test environments run all night and all weekend at full price.
05
Model reserved capacity only for genuinely steady workloads
Commitments beat on-demand for stable load and cost more than on-demand for spiky load.
06
Cache the static part of every AI prompt
Output tokens usually cost several times input tokens, and cached input costs a fraction again.
07
Shorten model outputs before shortening prompts
Trimming verbose responses cuts an API bill faster than any prompt engineering.
08
Negotiate at renewal, with consolidation as leverage
A larger commitment across fewer vendors buys a materially better discount than a flat renewal.
09
Scope compliance audits deliberately
Each extra trust services criterion adds audit work, evidence and remediation cost for the whole year.
Put it to work
Calculators for these tactics
Business & Tech
SaaS Spend & Seat Waste Calculator
What unused seats and overlapping tools cost, and what consolidation recovers.
Business & TechHosting & Cloud Cost Calculator
Monthly infrastructure spend across compute, bandwidth, storage and support.
Business & TechAI API Cost Calculator
Token spend per request, per user and at scale, including cache savings.
Business & TechSOC 2 Compliance Cost Calculator
Audit, tooling, engineering time and readiness — the full first-year cost.
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