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SaaS Cost Per Employee Calculator

Add up your software stack and see your annual spend per head - the fastest way to find out if you are over-provisioned.

Enter your numbers

people
seats
Sum every paid licence across every tool. Over-provisioning shows up here first.
$/seat/mo
$/mo
Cloud, hosting, monitoring, CI, security tooling.

Annual SaaS spend per employee

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Total annual software spend

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Paid seats per employee

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Estimated licence utilisation

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Assumes three core tools per person. Below 60% suggests you are paying for shelfware.

Estimates only. Vendor pricing and contract terms vary - always confirm figures on a written quote. Results update as you type and nothing is sent to a server.

Most companies have no idea what they spend on software per employee. The number is usually somewhere between $2,000 and $9,000 per head per year, and it is almost always higher than the finance team assumes. Enter your stack below to find your number.

How to use this calculator

  1. Export every subscription from your accounting system or card statements for the last twelve months.
  2. Sum the seats you pay for, not the seats you think you use. The gap between the two is usually 15-30%.
  3. Divide by headcount to get your per-employee number, then compare against the benchmarks below.
  4. Anything above $6,000 per head usually means duplicate tools or unused licences - both are quick wins.

Want to bring per-employee software spend down?

Rippling consolidates HR, IT and app management onto a single per-employee rate, which is usually cheaper than the stack of point tools it replaces - and it surfaces the subscriptions nobody is using.

See Rippling pricing

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Or replace a dozen subscriptions with one per-employee rate?

Zoho One bundles over forty business applications at a flat per-employee price, which turns the cost per employee on this page from a dozen line items into one.

See Zoho One pricing

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Frequently asked questions

What is a normal SaaS spend per employee?
For a 20-100 person software company, $3,500-$6,500 per employee per year is typical, including infrastructure. Non-technical businesses usually land lower, $1,500-$3,000, because they carry fewer developer and infrastructure tools.
How many paid seats should each employee have?
Four to six is normal for knowledge workers, three to four for operational staff. If you are above eight, you almost certainly have overlapping tools.
What is shelfware and how much does it cost?
Shelfware is a paid licence nobody logs into. Industry studies put unused SaaS at 20-35% of total spend. On a $500,000 annual stack, that is $100,000-$175,000 of pure waste.
How often should we review the software stack?
Quarterly for anything that auto-renews, and always 60 days before a renewal date - that is when you still have negotiating leverage.

Next steps

If your cost per employee sits well above the figures on this page, the fastest reduction is rarely renegotiating each subscription one at a time. It is finding the seats nobody logs into - start with whatever you rolled out to everyone at once.