101 hours per app: The true cost of "Click Ops"

How much time does your IT team spend manually managing one app?

Not the strategic work. Not the architecture decisions. The clicking. Logging into admin consoles. Adding users. Removing users. Resetting passwords. Chasing down access requests. Explaining gaps to auditors.

We measured it: 101 hours per app, per year.

That's 2.5 weeks of full-time work every year, per app.

If you have 16 apps without SCIM automation (which is average across our customer base), that’s 1,616 hours a year. Nearly a full FTE spent clicking buttons in browser windows.

You’re not paying for an IT team.You’re paying for a human API.

Where manual SaaS management hours actually go

Manual app management isn't one task. It's five tasks that never stop.

• Provisioning new users

Every new hire. Every role change. Every contractor onboarding. Someone has to log into each app, create the account, assign the right permissions, and hope they got it right.

• Deprovisioning departures

Every termination. Every transfer. Every contractor rolloff. Someone has to remember which apps the person had access to, log into each one, and remove them. Miss one, and it shows up in your next audit.

• Access reviews and audits

Quarterly reviews. SOC 2 prep. User access recertifications. Someone has to pull reports from each app - if reports even exist - and reconcile them against your source of truth.

• Firefighting

Password resets. "I can't log in" tickets. "I need access to X by end of day" requests. These aren't planned. They just interrupt whatever else your team was doing.

• Error correction

Fixing the mistakes from all of the above. The new hire who got the wrong permissions. The terminated employee who still has access three weeks later. The audit finding requires emergency remediation.

None of this is skilled work. And all of it requires manual human attention.

The labor-intensive outliers

Not every app costs 101 hours. Some cost twice that. Here are some examples from the apps we analyzed across our customer base.

Gainsight alone consumes 242 hours per year. That's six full work weeks managing a single app.

Monday.com hits 190 hours because everyone in the company uses it. Every hire, every departure, every team change means another login to the admin console.

AWS and Stripe are high because the stakes are high. You can't rush permission changes when you're dealing with production infrastructure or payment processing. So you go slow, double-check everything, and burn hours being careful.

These aren't obscure tools. They're apps you probably have.

The math behind manual SaaS management costs

Let's make this concrete. Using very conservative IT labor cost estimates,

Per app:

• 101 hours × $60/hr fully loaded = $6,088/year in labor alone

Per portfolio (16 apps average):

• 16 apps × 101 hours = 1,616 hours/year
• 1,616 hours ÷ 2,080 (standard work year) = 0.78 FTEs

You're paying almost one full engineer's salary just to click buttons in admin consoles.

And that's using the 101-hour average. If you have Gainsight, ClickUp, or AWS in your stack, the number goes higher.

Why the cost of manual SaaS management stays invisible

Here's why this never gets fixed: the labor doesn't show up on a budget line.

There's no line item for "manual SaaS provisioning." It's buried in "IT operations" or "general admin." No one tracks it, so no one knows how much it costs.

Your finance team sees headcount. They don't see that 0.78 of that headcount is spent on repetitive clicking that a machine could do.

But your IT team feels it. Every interrupted afternoon. Every audit scramble. Every "can you just add this person real quick" request that derails the actual project work.

What else could that time do?

Think about what 1,616 hours could accomplish if it weren't spent on Click Ops.

That's 40 full work weeks. A year's worth of project time.

Security improvements you've been putting off. Automation for other manual processes. Infrastructure work that keeps getting deprioritized. Documentation that never gets written.

Manual provisioning isn't just expensive. It's an opportunity cost. Every hour spent clicking buttons is an hour not spent on work that actually moves your organization forward.

Manual SaaS management costs more than just labor

Even if you pretend IT time is “free” (it isn’t), labor is only part of the bill.

Humans make mistakes.

• License waste: $3,925 per app per year
• Compliance gaps: $1,741 per app per year
• Labor: $6,088 per app per year

Total: $11,754 per app (normalized to 500 employees)

You’re bleeding nearly $12K per app to support a manual process that burns out your team.

The question isn’t whether you can afford to automate. It’s whether you can afford not to.

How to eliminate manual SaaS management costs

Stitchflow automates provisioning and deprovisioning for apps that don’t support SCIM or hide it behind enterprise pricing.

For less than $5K per app. No enterprise upgrades. Your IT team gets 101 hours back per app, per year.

That’s not a software purchase. That’s a headcount decision.

Still relying on manual SaaS management?

Let’s talk and find out how much time your team is losing, and how quickly automation pays for itself.