Count the apps you touched today. Not the ones installed on your laptop. The ones you actually opened, typed into, clicked around in. Slack. Your project manager. Google Docs. The company wiki. That AI chat window you keep meaning to close but never do.
How many? Seven? Ten? More?
BetterCloud found that companies with fewer than 500 employees now run an average of 172 SaaS applications. And Productiv's data puts individual usage at 9 to 13 apps per person, per day. Not installed. Not "has access to." Actively opened and used.
That's a part-time job nobody applied for.
The costs you're not tracking
Most conversations about too many apps at work start and end with money. How much are we spending on subscriptions? Can we cut a few? That's a fine place to start, but it's the shallowest part of the problem. The real damage is happening in places your finance team will never flag.
1. The financial bleed is worse than you think
Start with the obvious one. The average company wastes 25-35% of its SaaS budget on licenses that are either redundant or barely used. For a 50-person team spending $150,000 a year on software, that's $40,000-$50,000 gone. Not because anyone made a bad decision, but because nobody's watching the full picture.
Marketing adopts one project management tool. Engineering prefers another. Sales has a third. Each choice made sense in isolation. But now you're paying for three tools that do 70% of the same thing, and each one has per-seat pricing creeping up every renewal.
The subscriptions don't announce themselves. They pile up quietly. By the time someone runs an audit, there are tools on the books that the person who signed up for them doesn't even work at the company anymore.
2. Your team's focus is being taxed to death
This one hurts the most because it's invisible.
Researchers at the University of California, Irvine found that switching between tasks costs about 23 minutes of refocus time. But app overload goes beyond task switching. It's environment switching. Every app has its own layout, its own notification system, its own logic for where things live. Your brain reloads context every single time.
Then there's what psychologists call attention residue. When you leave Slack to update a task in Asana, part of your brain is still chewing on that Slack conversation. You're not fully present in either place. Multiply that across a dozen transitions a day and you start to understand why everyone's wiped by 3 PM despite not doing anything that felt particularly hard.
And there's a subtler problem. With too many work tools competing for the same job, you waste mental energy just deciding where to do things. Should this update go in Slack or the project tracker? Should I write this in Google Docs or Notion? Is this a task or a message? Those micro-decisions sound trivial. They compound all day, every day.
3. Every app is another door you leave unlocked
Nobody talks about this one: security.
Every SaaS tool your team uses is another vendor with access to your data. Another set of credentials to manage. Another attack surface. Verizon's Data Breach Investigations Report found that over 80% of breaches involve compromised credentials. The more apps your team logs into, the more passwords they're juggling and reusing.
IT teams at mid-size companies burn huge amounts of time just managing access. Who can see what? Did we revoke that contractor's login to the CRM? Does the marketing tool still have API access to our customer database?
SaaS sprawl creates security gaps that are almost impossible to audit when your data lives across dozens of platforms. It's not just a cost problem or a focus problem. It's a risk problem.
4. New hires drown before they start
Think about the last person you onboarded. How long before they were actually productive? Not "had their laptop set up" productive. Actually contributing.
A big chunk of that ramp-up time isn't learning the job. It's learning the tools. OK so Slack works like this, channels are organized like that. The project manager uses these statuses. The wiki is over here, but the doc tool is separate from the wiki. Files live in this drive, except some live in that other one.
When your stack is 10+ tools deep, onboarding is basically a software training program. New hires spend their first weeks learning to navigate the maze instead of doing the work they were hired for. Some of them never fully learn it. They just develop workarounds and hope nobody notices.
5. Your team's knowledge is in ten places at once
This one is probably the most expensive, and it's the hardest to put a number on.
When work happens across a dozen apps, knowledge fragments. Decisions get made in Slack threads. The rationale lives in a Google Doc. The resulting tasks are in a project manager. The reference files are in a shared drive. Three months later, someone needs to understand why a decision was made and they're doing archaeology across four platforms.
Information scattered across too many apps doesn't just slow people down. It effectively disappears. If finding something takes longer than recreating it, people will just recreate it. Or worse, they'll make the same decision again without the context that informed the first one.
You don't have a knowledge base. You have a knowledge landfill.
What to actually do about it
Complaining about app overload is easy. Fixing it takes more effort, but less effort than living with the status quo. A few things that actually work:
First, run a brutal audit. List every tool your company pays for. Who uses it? How often? What does it overlap with? You will find tools that can be killed today with zero impact. Every team that does this finds them.
Second, stop shopping by category. The instinct is to find the best chat app, the best task manager, the best doc tool. But that's how you end up with ten apps. Instead, look for platforms that cover multiple workflows in one place. How features connect to each other matters more than any single feature on its own.
Third, calculate the real cost of adding anything new. Not just the subscription fee. Factor in onboarding time, one more set of notifications for your team to monitor, one more place where knowledge can hide. If the tool doesn't clear that bar by a wide margin, skip it.
And finally, give your team fewer decisions about where to put things. Pick one place for conversations. One place for tasks. One place for docs. The specific tools matter less than the consistency. When everyone knows where things live, everything speeds up.
This is the direction we took with Trilo, putting tasks, conversations, docs, and AI coworkers into a single workspace so teams stop scattering their work across half a dozen apps. It's not the only way to consolidate, but the principle is the same: fewer tools, more context, less time navigating.
The uncomfortable math
Most teams could cut their tool count in half and work better for it. Not the same. Better. What you lose in specialized features, you gain back in focus, speed, and actually being able to find things when you need them.
Your software stack was supposed to make work easier. If managing it has become a job in itself, that's worth fixing.
Thinking about trimming your tool stack? We built Trilo for exactly this kind of problem. Check it out or drop us a line at hello@trilo.chat.
