Your SaaS stack costs more than it returns

The true cost of an under-used SaaS

An average 50-person French SMB uses between 25 and 40 SaaS apps. The direct cost averages around €350 per employee per month — that’s €17,500 monthly for a 50-person company.

That gross number is already high. But it understates the real cost, which includes four invisible items:

• Seats paid for employees who no longer log in.
• Hours wasted figuring out which tool holds which piece of information.
• Training time at every team turnover.
• The cost of functional duplicates (two tools doing the same thing in two different departments).

This hidden cost is usually 1.5 to 2 times the direct cost. So in a 50-person SMB, your real SaaS cost is around €35,000 to €50,000 per month.

The three tool families to question

Internal knowledge tools

Company wiki, DMS, knowledge base, intranet, SharePoint space, FAQ base. Often four or five tools in parallel, because none of them really stuck. No one knows where to look. No one maintains them.

Support and FAQ tools

Helpdesk, product knowledge base, scripted chatbot, contact form, internal ticketing. Half the questions arrive twice on two different tools, because users don’t know which one to use.

Writing assistance tools

Templates, quote libraries, proposal templates, correction extensions, mailing blocks. Often paid per user, often used at 20% of capacity.

What a centralized AI assistant absorbs

A well-fed AI assistant functionally replaces, to varying degrees, six to twelve tools in a typical SMB stack:

1. Document base search → knowledge assistant
2. Product FAQ / HR FAQ → internal assistant
3. External scripted chatbot → customer assistant (when relevant)
4. Quote and proposal drafting support → sales assistant
5. Meeting recap summaries → cross-functional capability
6. Onboarding documentation → new-hire assistant

On these six functions, it’s not about replacing each tool 100% — it’s about covering 80% of daily usage. The remaining 20% can stay on the specialized tool, or be dropped.

When ROI flips in under six months

The calculation we see most often with our SMB customers:

These numbers only include the direct drop in subscriptions. They don’t include hours saved by the team — which typically weigh two to three times more.

What to keep, what to cut

Three simple principles to sort:

Keep tools with a clear transactional function: CRM, accounting, payroll, project management. An AI assistant doesn’t replace a structured database.

Cut tools for unstructured knowledge — that’s where the assistant excels.

Stay cautious on anything touching legal, compliance, or signatures: leave the specialized expert in place, the assistant will support the expert, not replace them.

For an overview of deployment, see Preparing your business for AI assistants. To calibrate your case, the simulator on the pricing page gives a direct estimate.