Try something right now. Open your company's credit card statement and count the software subscriptions. Slack. Notion. Asana. Figma. Zoom. Google Workspace. HubSpot. Linear. Loom. Miro. That random tool someone on the marketing team signed up for in 2024 that nobody remembers canceling.
Go ahead. I'll wait.
If you're like most companies, the number is going to be higher than you think. A lot higher.
The subscription pile nobody talks about
According to Productiv's annual SaaS report, the average mid-size company now uses somewhere north of 200 SaaS applications. Not "has access to." Uses. Gartner pegs average per-employee SaaS spend at over $3,500 a year, and that number has climbed every year since they started tracking it.
But the raw dollar amount isn't even the biggest problem. It's what those 200 tools are doing to how your team actually works.
People are calling it SaaS fatigue. That feeling when you realize your "productivity stack" has become its own full-time job to manage.
The three costs nobody's calculating
When teams talk about too many apps at work, they usually focus on the subscription fees. Fair enough, those add up. But there are two other costs that are arguably worse.
1. The financial bleed
This one's obvious, so let's get it out of the way. The average company wastes somewhere between 25-35% of its SaaS budget on redundant or underused licenses. That's not a rounding error. For a 50-person company spending $175,000 a year on software, that's $45,000-60,000 going to tools people log into once a quarter or don't log into at all.
It's easy to miss because nobody's in charge of watching it. Engineering picks their tools. Marketing picks theirs. Sales has its own stack. Finance finds out when the invoices arrive.
2. The brain drain
This one doesn't show up on any balance sheet.
A study from the University of California, Irvine found that it takes about 23 minutes to fully refocus after switching between tasks. But we're not just switching tasks anymore. We're switching entire environments. Every app has its own interface, its own notification logic, its own way of organizing things. Each switch is a small cognitive tax.
Harvard Business Review published research showing that knowledge workers toggle between applications roughly 1,200 times per day. That's not a typo. Twelve hundred. Each toggle feels trivial, but they compound. By mid-afternoon you're running on fumes, and not because the work itself is hard. The switching is what's draining you.
That's context switching between apps doing what it does best. You're not tired from working. You're tired from navigating.
3. The fragmentation problem
When your work lives in six different tools, your team's knowledge does too. Decisions get made in Slack, documented in Notion, tracked in Asana, and referenced in Google Docs. When someone new joins or someone needs context three weeks later, they have to play detective across four platforms.
I've watched smart people spend 30 minutes trying to find a decision that was already made, because it was buried in a Slack thread nobody bookmarked, referencing a Notion page nobody updated.
That's tool fatigue in a nutshell. No single tool is bad. But having too many of them turns your collective knowledge into a scavenger hunt.
How we got here
This didn't happen because people made bad decisions. It happened because SaaS is really good at solving narrow problems.
Need project management? Here are 40 options, each with a free tier. Need a whiteboard? Pick one. Need AI writing help? There are hundreds. Each tool solves its specific job reasonably well. The problem is that nobody was designing for the overall experience of using all of them at once.
The SaaS model rewards specialization. Build one thing, do it well, charge monthly. From the customer side, though, specialization just means fragmentation. And fragmentation is the exact friction these tools were supposed to fix.
Free tiers made it worse. "Just sign up, it's free." Sure, until twenty people on your team are using the free version and now you need the paid plan. Multiply that across every tool in your stack and you've walked yourself into a subscription trap. Each individual cost feels reasonable. The total is absurd.
Breaking out: what actually works
So what do you do about it? I've seen a few approaches that work and a lot that don't.
Audit before you add
Before signing up for anything new, take stock of what you already have. Make a spreadsheet (ironic, I know) of every tool, who uses it, what it costs, and what it overlaps with. You will find redundancies. Every team that does this finds redundancies.
The exercise alone is worth doing. Most companies haven't run a proper SaaS audit in years. Some never have.
Consolidate around workflows, not features
Here's the shift that matters: stop shopping for the best tool in each category, and start looking for platforms that cover multiple workflows. The goal isn't to find the best standalone project manager, the best standalone docs tool, and the best standalone chat app. The goal is to reduce the number of places your team has to go.
This is where the market is heading. Notion expanded from docs into project management. Monday.com went from task tracking into CRM. The direction is clear.
When your project context, conversations, and docs live in the same place, you stop reconstructing context every time you switch tools. Because you're not switching.
Resist "best of breed" thinking
I know this one is controversial. The tech industry loves the idea that you should pick the absolute best tool for every single job. And in isolation, that's logical.
But in practice, the seventh-best project manager that's wired into everything else often beats the best project manager sitting on its own island. Shared context is worth more than a few extra features.
Set a tool budget that includes cognitive cost
When evaluating new software, don't just look at the price tag. Ask: does adding this tool require my team to learn another interface, monitor another set of notifications, and check another inbox? If the answer is yes, the real cost is a lot higher than $15/user/month.
Where this is going
For the last decade, we unbundled everything. Communication went to Slack. Tasks went to Asana. Docs went to Notion. AI went to ChatGPT. Each tool worked fine on its own. Nobody was thinking about what it feels like to be the person who has to use all of them in the same afternoon.
That's changing. Teams are asking a different question now. Not "which tool is best at X?" but "how do I reduce the number of tools my team needs to touch every day?"
That question is basically why Trilo exists. We built a workspace that puts tasks, conversations, docs, and AI in one place because we were drowning in the same sprawl I just described. It's one approach to consolidation, not the only one, but it's ours.
Whatever you end up doing, the math is simple: fewer tools, more context, less switching. Your team's attention is the most expensive thing you're paying for. Might as well stop wasting it on tab management.
Rethinking your tool stack? We built Trilo for exactly this problem. Take a look or say hi at hello@trilo.chat.
