what a 20-person startup pays for software.

loading estimate sharing…

the same stack, four sizes.

The core stack only — payroll, chat, docs, video, source control, issue tracking, observability and design. Add SSO, on-call, support or CRM in the table above and the total climbs.

what is a fact here, and what is an assumption.

fact

Every unit price is the vendor's own published list price, read off their pricing page and dated beside each line. Each vendor name links to its page, where the source is printed.

fact

The arithmetic. Units × the published monthly price, plus any platform fee, × 12. No discount is assumed anywhere on this page, which is why these figures read high — most companies pay something under list, and finding out how much less is the whole point of an audit.

assumption

The seat counts. We assume engineers are about half a software team, designers about a seventh, and that hosts scale roughly with headcount. Those ratios are ours, not anyone's published data. They are printed beside every line and you can overwrite each one.

assumption

"Typically recoverable" is our own starting expectation for how much of a line comes back without changing provider, set from each vendor's published discount programs and the ordinary waste patterns at this company size. It ranges from 10% on payment processing to 40% on a warehouse. It is not drawn from customer audits and it is not a promise about your invoice. Your invoices are what correct it.

the biggest lines have no list price. they still have levers.

Everything above is a seat, a host or a person — a published number you can multiply. Cloud, model APIs, the warehouse and messaging are metered: no pricing page can tell you what you will owe, and at a 20-person company they are usually larger than every seat licence combined. But the discounts on them are published. AWS prints its Savings Plan rates. OpenAI and Anthropic print the Batch and prompt-cache discounts. So instead of leaving these lines blank, we ask you for one number — what you spend a month — and apply the published levers to it.

The monthly spends behind this table are ours, not yours — we assume a company with a product in production. Overwrite all four below and the arithmetic follows. The levers, and the source for each, open line by line.

6 metered lines, 22 levers, checked 3-12 Sep 2026. 9 of them carry a rate the vendor publishes. 6 apply a conservative share of our own, labelled as an estimate beside the number. And 7 we refuse to price at all — either the vendor never publishes the size of the discount, or it publishes the size but whether the money reaches your bill depends on a licence or an eligibility we cannot see from outside. Each of those adds $0 to every total on this page rather than a figure we invented, and each states which of the two it is. That is the difference between an estimate and a guess.