If you listed right now how many software subscriptions your company pays for monthly, you'd probably be surprised by the total — and even more by how many items on the list you couldn't even say who uses or why. Software subscriptions multiply quietly: someone tries a tool for a project, the project ends, but the subscription — on auto-renewal — keeps running, month after month, unnoticed.

Why subscriptions multiply invisibly

The vast majority of modern software runs on a subscription model, often for just a few thousand forints a month, which on its own seems negligible — and that's exactly why no one thinks twice about it when a new tool gets introduced. The problem isn't the price of individual subscriptions — it's their accumulation: five to ten such, individually "cheap" tools together can add up to a significant monthly expense that no one sees in one place, because each item runs on a different bank statement line, under a different person's name.

Alongside this is another phenomenon: teams often switch tools without officially cancelling the old one. A team moves to a new project management tool, but the old subscription, started by someone else, keeps running because there's no clear owner to cancel it. This kind of "shadow subscription" is one of the most common, most easily eliminated, yet least often noticed expense items at a growing SME.

The audit that always brings surprises

The practical solution is simple, though time-consuming: put together a complete list of every active software subscription, as far as possible, based on bank statements and card charges, because that's the one place every item is guaranteed to show up, regardless of who started it or why. For each item, ask: who's actively using this, how critical is it to daily operations, and is there another tool you already use that would cover the same function?

This exercise almost always uncovers at least a few subscriptions no one's used in months, or that another, already-existing tool could replace — two different project management tools, three different file-sharing services, a design tool someone tried once and then forgot to cancel. These unnecessary items are rarely expensive on their own, but added up they regularly amount to a surprisingly large sum — money that goes out every month without anyone having deliberately decided on it.

The regular review that prevents them from piling up again

After a one-time audit and cleanup, the problem tends to come back if there's no lasting habit behind it. The solution is introducing a simple, annual (or twice-yearly) review routine: one owner — not necessarily the business owner, just someone who does this consistently — goes through the full subscription list, and for each item asks whether it's still actively used. This kind of regular maintenance is far cheaper and simpler than a big, rarely-done "spring cleaning," because it prevents unnecessary items from piling up for months or years before anyone notices.

The most expensive software subscription isn't the one that costs the most — it's the one no one knows is still running, and no one is using.

A useful additional rule: when a team starts using a new tool instead of an old one, make cancelling the old tool a mandatory part of the switch process, not a separate, later step — because it's exactly that "we'll do it later" that means unnecessary subscriptions, in practice, never disappear on their own.

If you'd like to get your company's software subscriptions organized and transparent, let's review together — it's often surprising how quickly you'll find where the unnecessary spending is.