Daniel had been head of operations at a seventy-person scale-up for two years when he first presented a cost reduction proposal to the leadership team and watched it die in the room. The proposal was reasonable. He had identified twelve SaaS subscriptions across the company that were either duplicated in function or demonstrably underused — tools where the majority of licences were going untouched, tools where two teams were paying separately for platforms that addressed identical needs. His spreadsheet showed a potential saving of £2,100 per month. He had spent three weeks building it.
The CFO had read through it and asked a question that Daniel hadn't adequately prepared for: "How confident are you that consolidating these tools won't break something?"
Daniel had been confident. What he hadn't been was specific. He could show that two tools overlapped. He couldn't show precisely which capabilities they shared, which team relied on which specific features, and what the realistic transition cost of consolidation would be versus the projected saving. The CFO's question wasn't sceptical — it was reasonable due diligence — and Daniel's spreadsheet couldn't answer it.
The proposal was tabled for "further analysis." It was never revisited.
The SaaS spend continued.
Eighteen months later, working at a different company — fifty-two people, Series A funded, burning through a runway that made the leadership team acutely sensitive to any discussion of costs — Daniel found stackaudit.co.uk through a post on LinkedIn from another operations lead who described it as "the thing that finally made my stack audit presentable to finance."
He signed up on a Thursday morning with low expectations.
The first thing he did was run the redundancy detector on their current stack. He uploaded a CSV export from their finance platform — the same format he'd been working from in his spreadsheet, with tool names, monthly costs, and the number of active licences for each. The tool matched each entry against its database of three-hundred-plus AI and SaaS products, pulled the feature-level data for each one, and returned a clustered analysis of functional overlap.
The output identified four redundancy clusters.
Cluster one: three tools with overlapping documentation and knowledge management functionality — Confluence, Notion, and a specialist internal wiki platform they'd adopted eighteen months earlier. Combined monthly cost: £680. The tool mapped the specific features they shared (page creation, team permissions, search, comment and collaboration), noted which features were unique to each, and provided an estimated consolidation saving if they standardised on one platform. Cluster two: two AI writing tools — a company-wide ChatGPT Plus subscription managed centrally and individual Claude.ai subscriptions that four team members had signed up for on personal cards and were expensing monthly. Combined monthly cost: £230. The tool noted that both primarily served writing assistance and ideation, flagged the expense claim structure as an audit risk beyond the pure cost question, and suggested a unified team subscription would address both concerns. Cluster three: two project management tools that two separate teams used in parallel — one adopted by engineering before the company's standardised platform was chosen, never deprecated. Monthly cost: £140. The tool noted that migration from the legacy tool had a known friction cost but was straightforwardly achievable.
Cluster four: two video hosting platforms with overlapping use cases. Monthly cost: £190. Total identified redundancy: £1,240 per month. Annual: £14,880.
What Daniel did next was the part that made the difference.
He ran each cluster through the Automation ROI Calculator — not for the AI writing tools, which were straightforward, but for the consolidation of the documentation tools, which was the largest saving but also the most disruptive change. The calculator took his estimated migration cost (twelve hours of internal IT time at £45 fully loaded per hour, plus two weeks of team adjustment friction priced conservatively as ten percent of productivity for eight people over two weeks), calculated a payback period, and returned a twelve-month net saving figure under three scenarios.
Then it generated a CFO brief.
One hundred and fifty words. Headline, problem, proposed solution, investment required, twelve-month return. Formatted for copy-paste into a board document.
Daniel read it once, made two small edits to reflect internal context, and included it in a presentation slide deck he took to the leadership team the following Tuesday.
The CFO asked the same question she always asked: "How confident are you that consolidating these tools won't break something?"
This time Daniel had an answer. Not a confident assertion — a structured one. He could show the specific capabilities that overlapped and which were unique. He could show the migration cost and timeline. He could show the payback period: three months to break even, £13,200 net positive in year one at the conservative estimate.
The CFO approved the documentation consolidation and the AI writing tool rationalisation on the spot. The video hosting consolidation was deferred pending a conversation with the team lead whose workflow depended on it.
The approved savings: £870 per month. Annual: £10,440.
"This is the first cost proposal I've approved in a year," the CFO told Daniel after the meeting, "where I felt like someone had done the actual maths rather than the optimistic maths."
What stackaudit.co.uk gave Daniel wasn't information he couldn't have assembled himself. It was structure — the framework for presenting operational analysis in the language that finance teams speak. Not "we're paying for the same thing twice" but "the specific overlapping capabilities are these, the consolidation cost is this, and the return on that investment is this, under three different assumptions."
The tool didn't make the argument. It made the argument presentable.
For Daniel, that distinction was worth £10,440 a year and a CFO who had started forwarding his proposals instead of tabling them.
He sent me a message six weeks after that meeting. It said: "Second proposal approved this morning. Stack audit flagged two more clusters. Same structure. Same CFO. Zero hesitation." The third proposal was approved the following month.
stackaudit.co.uk — AI Tool Selector free (5 queries/month). Full redundancy analysis and ROI calculator on the Pro plan at £29/seat/month.