SaaS costs grow eight percent a year: why connecting your tools now pays off more than buying a new one

Recent research across hundreds of organisations worldwide shows that the average company now runs around three hundred SaaS applications, from the accounting package to separate tools for forms, scheduling or customer contact. What stands out more than the number itself is what happens on top of it this year: annual spending is growing by roughly eight percent, while the number of tools barely increases. Software is not getting more expensive because organisations buy more. It is getting more expensive because vendors are charging differently.

Why the bill rises without you buying anything new

Many vendors are now splitting their subscriptions into tiers, adding an AI feature as a premium option, and moving from a flat fee per user to usage-based pricing. A tool that had a fixed monthly price last year might now charge per processed email, per AI call, or per active integration. For an organisation running fifteen to thirty tools, as many companies do, that quickly adds up to a bill nobody has a full overview of any more.

That makes budgeting harder. A subscription that cost two hundred euros a month last year can cost three hundred this year without a single extra user, purely because a feature that used to be included is now billed separately. For financial planning, this means you can no longer assume fixed annual amounts per tool.

Tools nobody uses any more keep running anyway

Part of those apps were also never formally approved in the first place. A marketing employee trials a social media scheduling tool, a project lead turns a free trial into a paid subscription, and nobody reports it to whoever reviews the invoices. Research on shadow IT shows that a large majority of applications in use arise outside the view of IT or finance. The result: subscriptions keep running for months after use has already stopped, and nobody notices until the annual cost review.

Every missing connection is work someone does by hand

The real problem is not the number of tools but how disconnected they are. A new customer comes in through the CRM but has to be created separately in the accounting system. A support ticket in the helpdesk is not linked to the customer record, so an employee looks it up by hand. A form on the website captures a name and email address, which then gets retyped into the newsletter software. Every bit of retyping costs time, and every bit of retyping is a chance for a typo, a missed customer, or an invoice sent to the wrong person.

AI makes connecting tools faster, even without your own developer

Until recently, connecting two systems almost always meant custom work: someone reading through both platforms' documentation and building the connection by hand. Automation platforms such as n8n, Zapier and Make made this easier for years with ready-made building blocks, but setting up a workflow still required someone who knew the platform. That is changing this year. The major automation platforms are all adding an AI assistant that builds a connection from a plain-language description, for example: when a new customer comes in through the CRM, automatically create a contact in the accounting system and send a welcome email. The AI turns that description into a working workflow, often within minutes, and then presents it for review.

That lowers the barrier considerably. Where building a connection used to be a project with a quote and a timeline, for many simpler cases it is now a matter of writing a few sentences and checking the result. For more complex integrations, where multiple systems and business rules come together, guidance from someone who knows the platforms is still a good idea.

Why connecting now beats buying another tool

Research among SaaS vendors themselves confirms what IT partners have noticed for a while: customers who have connected their tools switch to a competitor less often. A large majority of vendors surveyed say customers with working integrations stay more loyal. The same holds the other way around, for the organisation using the tools. A connected set of fifteen tools that work well together delivers more than thirty separate subscriptions nobody fully oversees any more. Before buying another platform for a problem an existing tool already partly solves, it is worth first checking what you already have and where the connection is actually missing.

Start with a simple inventory: which tools does the organisation still pay for, who still uses them, and which two systems cost the most manual work because they do not talk to each other. Often the biggest time savings do not come from a new purchase but from connecting what is already there. Want to know which connections would pay off most in your situation, or help setting up automation between your existing platforms? Get in touch with Zarioh.