Before you argue about the price of a licence, it’s worth checking how many you’re using. Most organisations are paying for a meaningful number of seats that nobody logs into, and that number is usually larger than any discount available at renewal.
It’s also the only lever that doesn’t need the vendor to agree to anything. A discount is a negotiation. Reducing quantity is arithmetic.
Where the dead seats come from
Nobody buys licences they don’t need. They accumulate, and always through the same handful of routes.
People leave, and offboarding removes their email and their VPN because those are the ones IT owns, while the six SaaS tools their manager expensed stay active. Teams reorganise, and the analytics seats bought for a project that ended are still renewing two years later. Someone runs a pilot with twenty seats, three people liked it, and the order form was for twenty. And the most expensive pattern of all: a whole department sits on a premium tier because two of them needed one premium feature, since it was easier to upgrade everybody than to manage two groups.
None of that is negligence. It’s what happens when purchasing is fast and deprovisioning is nobody’s job.
The count that changes a renewal
You need three numbers per tool, and you can get them without buying anything.
Seats purchased. From the order form, not from the admin console, because those disagree more often than you’d think and the contract is what you’re paying for.
Seats assigned. From the vendor’s admin panel. The gap between purchased and assigned is pure waste and the easiest thing to fix, since you’re paying for seats that aren’t even allocated to a human.
Seats actually used. Last login, or better, last meaningful action, over ninety days. Most admin panels expose this and the ones that don’t will usually hand it over if you ask your rep, which is a slightly awkward conversation and worth having.
Then cross-reference the assigned list against your identity provider or HR system. Every account belonging to somebody who’s left is both a cost and a security problem, and framing it as the second one tends to get it prioritised faster than framing it as the first.
The tier question, which is worth more than the seat count
Once you have usage, ask a second question about the people who are active: are they using what they’re paying for?
Tiered pricing assumes a team splits neatly into power users and everyone else. In practice most organisations put everyone on the higher tier for one of two reasons, either the feature they needed was gated there, or splitting the team into two groups sounded like ongoing admin work. That decision is often correct at the time and quietly wrong two years later, once the feature has moved down a tier or the people who needed it have moved on.
Price the mixed configuration before renewal. Twenty premium and eighty standard is frequently a larger saving than any percentage you’d have won by arguing, and it’s a change you can make unilaterally.
Doing it without buying a tool
There’s an entire software category for this, and it’s genuinely useful past a certain size. Below that size it’s a spreadsheet and an afternoon.
Start with your five most expensive subscriptions rather than all forty, because spend concentrates hard and the long tail can wait. Pull the assigned list from each admin panel, export your active employee list, and compare. Then look at last-login dates for whoever survives that pass.
Your card statements and expense reports are the other half of the picture, since they surface the subscriptions that never went through procurement at all. That overlaps with finding the tools nobody approved, and it’s the same afternoon of work, so do both at once.
Timing, which decides whether any of it counts
Here’s the part that catches people. Finding twenty unused seats in month three of a twelve-month term saves you nothing, because you already bought them. Annual contracts almost never let you reduce mid-term, and the ones that do usually cap it.
So the audit has to land before the renewal paperwork, ideally ninety days out, which is why it sits where it does in the renewal timeline. Do it early enough and the reduced count becomes your opening position. Do it late and it becomes next year’s problem.
Watch for the co-termination trap too. Vendors like aligning all your products onto one renewal date, which is convenient, and it also means a single missed window commits you to everything at once.
What to do with the number
Reducing the count is the obvious move and sometimes the wrong one. If you’re going to grow into those seats within a few months, cutting them and buying them back at a worse rate is a bad trade, so check what re-adding costs before you cut.
The alternative is to spend the number rather than bank it. A vendor facing a real reduction in seats will often protect the total contract value instead, which gives you room to ask for a rate hold, an uplift cap, better terms, or a tier upgrade for the people who need one. You’re converting waste into protection, and protection is what stops this from happening again.
Either way you now know something you didn’t before, which is what you’re actually buying with an afternoon of spreadsheet work.
CopperFeed tracks pricing and packaging changes as they’re announced, including the tier reshuffles that decide whether your current configuration still makes sense.
General guidance, not legal or procurement advice. Your own contract terms govern what you can change and when.
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