The most expensive apps
to manage manually
It's not just the license cost. It's the "SCIM Tax".
We analyzed 500 deployments to find the apps creating the most wasted licenses, burned IT hours, and compliance findings.
Financial impact
Apps causing the highest total financial loss across licenses, labor, and cleanups.
Freshservice
ITSM touches every employee. Complex agent, requester, and admin licensing tiers create provisioning chaos that IT assumes is under control—until the renewal shocks them.
Salesforce
High seat costs combined with high sales turnover means every delay burns cash. Managers hoard licenses to avoid procurement, leaving expensive seats idle.
ClickUp
Easy invites and viral growth mean user counts explode. With no clear "owner" for offboarding, seats persist forever after projects end.
Gainsight
Complex customer success role structures and sensitive revenue data make manual changes slow and error-prone.
Miro
Project-based collaboration that rarely gets cleaned up. External sharing and "Day 1" provisioning create massive license bloat.
Zendesk
Support teams have high agent turnover and 24/7 roster changes. Manual provisioning can't keep up with the constant flux.
Shopify
Contractors and seasonal staff get access for Q4, but their expensive accounts often linger well into Q2 of the next year.
Adobe
Creative Cloud seats are pricey and often managed outside standard IT flows, making them easy to forget during offboarding.
Gong
Extremely expensive seats combined with high sales turnover. Even a few orphaned licenses can cost thousands.
Monday.com
Company-wide adoption often leads to constant adds/removes. Without automation, the "remove" part rarely happens.
License waste
The 'Silent Spenders'. Apps that hemorrhage budget through unused seats.
Freshservice
Agent licenses are often handed out liberally and rarely reclaimed, creating a massive pool of unused but paid-for seats.
Salesforce
Sales managers hoard licenses to avoid the hassle of procurement requests, keeping departed reps assigned "just in case."
ClickUp
It starts free or cheap, but viral internal adoption quickly pushes organizations into expensive tiers with no usage tracking.
Miro
Full seats provisioned for a single strategy workshop often remain active—and billed—for years after the workshop ends.
Shopify
Store staff and agency accounts persist long after seasonal work or projects conclude, silently draining budget.
Atlassian
JSM Service Desk seats often outlive the agents who used them. It's common to find active seats for employees who left months ago.
Zendesk
High agent churn + expensive seats = compounding waste. If you don't offboard immediately, you pay double.
Adobe
Licenses requested for "occasional" editing needs often see zero login activity after the first month.
Figma
Designer seats stay assigned even after employees move to management roles where Viewer seats would suffice.
Gong
Because seats are so pricey, even a small number of forgotten accounts from departed sales reps adds up to significant waste.
Compliance risk
The #1 audit targets. Apps generating the most SOC 2 findings.
Freshservice
IT system access is the #1 audit target. Terminated agents retaining access to your ITSM is a critical SOC 2 finding.
DocuSign
Houses your most sensitive contracts and legal signatures. Access for departed employees is a major security gap.
Salesforce
Contains all customer PII and revenue data. Auditors always ask for evidence of timely access revocation here.
Atlassian
Access to code repos and infrastructure. Permission sprawl across Jira/Confluence/Bitbucket creates a massive attack surface.
Gainsight
Customer health scores and renewal data are sensitive. Unmanaged access can lead to competitive intelligence leaks.
ChatGPT
The newest tool and the least governed. Auditors are now specifically asking how you manage AI access and data retention.
Miro
Boards contain strategy docs, product roadmaps, and screenshots of everything sensitive. It's a visual database of your IP.
Zoom
Retained access means access to cloud recordings and transcripts of sensitive internal meetings.
Microsoft 365
Email, SharePoint, OneDrive. Failing to deprovision here leaves practically everything open.
Slack
DMs, private channels, and file history. Former employees retaining access to Slack history is a privacy nightmare.
Notice a pattern?
Freshservice, Salesforce, and Miro appear on almost every list—effectively functioning as "Triple Threats".
If these are in your unautomated stack, they should be prioritized for remediation immediately.
Automate your stack