The true cost of 'cheap' software

Nobody buys an expensive software stack. They buy one £29 tool, then another, then a third to cover the gap between the first two. Per-seat pricing does the rest: a six-person business paying for four tools at an average of £24 a seat is spending roughly £7,000 a year before anyone has done any work.

The licence fees are the visible half. The invisible half is the re-typing — the same customer entered into three systems, the same job copied from the quote tool to the invoice tool to the spreadsheet. In the businesses we audit, that manual bridging costs more than the subscriptions themselves: ten to fifteen staff-hours a week is typical.

The trap is that each tool, judged alone, seems worth it. The stack, judged together, rarely is. That's why our audit starts by listing everything and pricing the gaps between tools — not the tools themselves.

The alternative isn't a fifth tool. It's one system that does the four jobs your business actually needs, owned outright, with no seats to count. Software should pay for itself — that's not a slogan, it's arithmetic.