Every company has a folder of SaaS logins nobody remembers signing up for. Most of them are fine. A few of them are load-bearing. The gap between those two groups is the only thing worth writing about.
Tolerated versus load-bearing
A tolerated tool is one you could remove on a Friday and no one would notice until Monday, if then. A load-bearing tool is one whose outage becomes a company-wide event, because the work literally cannot proceed without it.
Vendors want to sell you the second kind and price you like the first. Buyers, if they are honest, can usually tell the difference within a week of real use.
The signals that matter
We look for a few concrete signs that a product has changed work rather than just added a tab:
- A workflow disappeared. A meeting, a spreadsheet, a handoff — something that used to exist is simply gone.
- New behavior appeared. People started doing something they could not do before, and it stuck without a mandate.
- The org chart bent slightly. Roles shifted, a bottleneck moved, a team got smaller or a new one made sense.
None of these show up in seat count. All of them show up in how people describe their day.
Why pricing pages lie
A pricing page describes what a vendor wants to be paid for. It rarely describes what customers actually value. The feature that closes deals and the feature that changes work are often not the same feature.
That is why we try to talk to the people who use the thing at 4pm on a bad day, not the people who bought it in a boardroom.
The honest test
Here is the test we apply, and recommend: imagine the tool is gone next quarter. Not deprecated gracefully — just gone. Write down what breaks. If the list is short and boring, it was a tab. If the list is long and specific, it changed the work. Everything else is branding.