- Half of mid-market executives told us they’d been surprised by a renewal, and half said they waste 20% or more on unused licenses.
- Nearly half lack any centralized view of their SaaS, so the waste is invisible until an invoice or an audit surfaces it.
- The root cause is structural: software is bought through many doors, and no single system tracks the contract, the renewal, and the real usage together.
- A typical 250-person company loses about $180K a year to unused and forgotten software, and manual tracking catches only about 60% of renewals.
This report summarizes what License Logic heard from 80 mid-market executives and more than 100 buyer conversations about how software spend and renewals actually go wrong. The pattern is consistent across industries: the problem is rarely a lack of intent, and almost always a lack of a single place where the contract, the renewal date, and the real usage live together.
The findings below are drawn from first-party interviews and anonymized buyer conversations. The numbers are the ones we can stand behind; the qualitative patterns are how mid-market finance and IT leaders described the problem in their own words.
The headline numbers
Three findings from License Logic’s interviews with 80 mid-market executives frame the whole picture:
Source: License Logic’s interviews with 80 mid-market executives.
Put together, they describe a single failure mode. Half of buyers can’t see their stack, so half get surprised by renewals, so half keep paying for licenses nobody uses. Each number is a symptom of the same missing system of record.
Where the money leaks
Across the conversations, the waste concentrated in a few predictable places:
- Renewals that fire before anyone looksTeams described renewal tracking as reactive rather than proactive: the date lived in a spreadsheet or someone’s memory, and the first sign of a renewal was often the charge. Manual tracking catches only about 60% of renewals.
- Seats assigned to nobodyBulk purchases sized for growth that never fully arrived, and licenses that stayed assigned after people left. One enterprise IT team described thousands of unassigned seats of a single AI add-on they couldn’t even reassign.
- Spend scattered across systemsOne legal operations leader described contracts living in more than a dozen different systems across the group. When spend is that decentralized, no one can total what a vendor costs, let alone whether the tool is used.
- Manual, one-at-a-time buyingIn specialized tooling, teams described buying expensive seats one at a time on cards, with nobody watching the aggregate until it became real money.
Why it happens
The common thread is that software enters the company through many doors and no single job is to collect it. Procurement keeps one folder, legal another, an e-signature tool a third, and department heads buy on cards that never reach anyone. The renewal date, the contract, and the usage data each live in a different place, owned by a different person, so the coordination that would prevent waste never happens on time.
What the teams that avoid it do differently
The executives who reported the fewest surprises shared a few habits, none of them exotic:
- They centralize the visibility, not the buyingOne repository where every agreement carries its extracted terms, owner, and renewal date, even when the buying stays decentralized.
- They arm renewal alerts 60 to 90 days outTied to the notice deadline and sent to a named owner, so there’s time to review usage and renegotiate on their schedule.
- They tie spend to real usageThe seat count you pay for next to the seat count anyone actually signs into, so a renewal is right-sized on evidence.
- They reclaim at offboarding, not at renewalReleasing seats when someone leaves, so the waste never accumulates into next year’s committed count.
What this means for mid-market teams in 2026
The gap between the teams that get surprised and the teams that don’t isn’t budget or headcount; it’s whether contracts, renewals, spend, and usage live in one view. That’s the problem License Logic is built to solve for 50-to-2,000-person companies. If you want to put numbers to your own stack, our guide to running a SaaS spend audit walks through the exact steps, and reducing SaaS costs covers the playbook.
License Logic puts every contract, its renewal date, your real usage, and your spend in one view, so the surprises in this report stop being your surprises. It’s built for mid-market finance and IT teams, not enterprise scale you won’t use.
Frequently asked questions
How was this research conducted?
The quantitative findings come from License Logic’s structured interviews with 80 mid-market executives. The qualitative patterns are drawn from more than 100 buyer conversations, anonymized to the industry level with no company names or identifying details.
How much do mid-market companies waste on SaaS?
Half of the executives we interviewed reported wasting 20% or more of their license spend on seats nobody uses. For a typical 250-person company, unused and forgotten software runs about $180K a year. The exact figure varies, but almost every audit finds more than expected.
Why do so many teams get surprised by renewals?
Because the renewal date usually lives in a spreadsheet or someone’s memory rather than a system that alerts an owner. Manual tracking catches only about 60% of renewals, so the ones that slip renew on the vendor’s terms instead of yours.
What’s the single most effective fix?
Put the contract, its renewal date, and the real usage in one view, and arm alerts 60 to 90 days before each notice deadline. That one change turns renewals from surprises into scheduled decisions, which is what separated the teams with the fewest problems.
Is this an enterprise or mid-market problem?
Both have it, but the tooling differs. Enterprises buy large discovery-and-governance platforms; mid-market teams (50-2,000 employees) usually get more value from a tighter tool that ties spend and usage to the contract and its renewal, without the enterprise footprint.