what a 20-person startup pays for software.
On published list prices, a 20-person company running the ordinary seat-based stack pays $13,862 a year across 8 vendors. About $2,748 of that is recoverable without changing a single provider — unused seats, the wrong tier, on-demand billing where annual was available.
Every unit price below is the vendor's own published figure, checked 25 Aug 2026. The seat counts are our assumption about how each line scales with a team — a 20-person company does not buy 20 Figma seats — so every count is printed with who it covers, and every one is editable. Change your headcount and the whole bill moves.
| vendor | units | plan | at list | recoverable | on the bill |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gusto everyone, payroll | people on payroll | Simple | $2,028/yr | $304/yr 15% | |
| Slack everyone | users | Pro, annual | $1,740/yr | $261/yr 15% | |
| Notion everyone | seats | Plus | $2,400/yr | $480/yr 20% | |
| Zoom everyone | users | Pro, annual | $3,398/yr | $849/yr 25% | |
| GitHub engineers, about half the team | users | Team | $480/yr | $72/yr 15% | |
| Linear engineering and product | users | Basic, annual | $1,440/yr | $216/yr 15% | |
| Datadog hosts, not people | hosts | Infrastructure Pro, annual | $1,800/yr | $450/yr 25% | |
| Figma designers with full seats | full seats | Professional full seat | $576/yr | $115/yr 20% | |
| Okta everyone, if you run SSO | users | Starter Suite, annual | $1,440/yr | $288/yr 20% | |
| PagerDuty the on-call rotation | users | entry paid tier, annual | $1,512/yr | $302/yr 20% | |
| Zendesk support agents | agents | Team, annual | $456/yr | $91/yr 20% | |
| Atlassian / Jira engineering, instead of Linear | users | Standard, annual | $1,139/yr | $227/yr 20% | |
| Salesforce sales seats | users | Starter Suite | $1,200/yr | $420/yr 35% | |
| 8 of 13 vendors, 20 people | $13,862/yr | $2,748/yr | |||
the same stack, four sizes.
| people | at list, per year | typically recoverable | per person, per year |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10 | $7,321/yr | $1,437/yr | $732/yr |
| 20 | $13,862/yr | $2,748/yr | $693/yr |
| 35 | $23,884/yr | $4,759/yr | $682/yr |
| 50 | $33,870/yr | $6,756/yr | $677/yr |
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 25 Aug 2026. 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 the share of a line the audits we have run have recovered without changing provider. It ranges from 10% on payment processing to 40% on a warehouse. It is a starting expectation for a company your size, not a promise about your invoice.
the biggest lines are missing, and that is the point.
Everything above is a seat, a host or a person — a published number you can multiply. The lines that are usually larger than the whole table above are metered, and no pricing page can tell you what you will owe: cloud, the data warehouse, model APIs, messaging. They are also where we find the most waste. A 20-person company we audit typically spends more per month on these than on every seat license combined.
- Snowflake40%per credit (compute)
- AWS35%usage-based, no fixed list price
- HubSpot30%per month (platform) + per seat
- Segment30%custom quote
- OpenAI API30%per 1M tokens
- per 1M tokens
- Intercom30%per seat / month + Fin AI usage
- per hour (dedicated cluster)
The percentage is the share of that line our audits have typically recovered. There is no headcount arithmetic that produces these amounts — only an invoice does.
this page is arithmetic. your invoices are the truth.
A list price multiplied out tells you what the market charges. It cannot tell you which seats are licensed to people who left, which renewal is three weeks away, or what your incumbent would do if a named competitor put a number in writing. That needs your actual bills. Forward last quarter's invoices and the findings come back with amounts against your own lines — free, no card, no password.