The Tool You Added Last Quarter Is Probably Costing You More Than It's Worth
You know the pattern. A vendor demos something impressive. Your team gets excited about solving a specific problem. You sign the contract. Six months later, one person uses it occasionally, it doesn't talk to your other systems, and the problem it was supposed to solve still exists - you've just added a new login to remember.
The average marketing team doesn't have a technology problem. They have a tool accumulation problem.
What separates high-performing marketing operations from the rest isn't having more sophisticated tools. It's having fewer tools that actually work together. The teams we work with who've cut their stack in half typically report moving faster, not slower.
This isn't about minimalism for its own sake. It's about recognizing that every tool you add introduces friction: another integration to maintain, another login to manage, another data silo to reconcile, another renewal to negotiate.
Here's a framework for being ruthless about what stays and what goes.
The Four-Question Audit
Before evaluating any specific category, run every tool in your stack through these questions:
Who used this in the last 30 days? Not who could use it. Not who was trained on it. Who actually logged in and did something meaningful? If the answer is "nobody" or "just one person who could do the same thing elsewhere," that's your first red flag.
What would break if we cancelled it tomorrow? Real dependencies reveal real value. If nothing would break - if you'd just "lose access to some data" or "have to do things manually" - you're describing a nice-to-have, not a necessity.
Does this create or consume data from our core systems? Tools that live in isolation are tools that create extra work. Every standalone platform requires manual reconciliation, duplicate entry, or blind spots in your reporting.
What's the actual cost per outcome? Not cost per seat. Not cost per feature. What does it cost you to achieve the thing you bought it for? A tool that costs twice as much but gets used three times more is the better investment.
What Actually Matters by Function
Rather than listing categories and naming vendors, here's what the essential stack actually does - and where bloat typically hides.
Customer Data Foundation
Your CRM and customer data infrastructure are non-negotiable. Everything else flows from knowing who your customers are and what they've done.
The bloat creeps in through bolt-on analytics tools that duplicate what your CRM should already track, standalone survey platforms that don't feed back into customer records, and "enrichment" services you bought once for a specific campaign and never cancelled.
Keep what: Serves as your single source of truth for customer identity and history. Cut what: Creates parallel customer records that require manual reconciliation.
Execution Layer
You need something for email. You need something for your website. You need something for paid channels.
The question isn't whether you have these covered - it's whether you have them covered three times over. Many teams have a marketing automation platform, an email platform, and a transactional email service, all doing overlapping things. Or a CMS, a landing page builder, and a form tool, when one platform could handle all three.
Keep what: Powers your primary customer-facing channels with reliable delivery and clear reporting. Cut what: Handles edge cases you could solve within existing tools with moderate effort.
Content Production
Here's where shiny object syndrome hits hardest. Every quarter brings a new AI writing tool, a new design platform, a new video editor, a new collaboration system.
The pattern we see: teams accumulate content tools faster than they can learn them. They end up with three different places to create social graphics, two video editing tools (one for quick clips, one for "professional" work that never gets used), and AI writing subscriptions that duplicate what's now built into the platforms they already pay for.
Keep what: Gets used by multiple people, produces consistent output, connects to your distribution channels. Cut what: Was bought for a specific project and kept "just in case."
Analytics and Reporting
The irony of marketing analytics is that teams drowning in data often have less clarity than teams with fewer, better-integrated tools.
You need web analytics. You need to understand attribution at some level. You need to report on pipeline impact.
You probably don't need separate dashboards for every channel, a standalone BI tool that duplicates your marketing platform's reporting, or multiple attribution solutions giving you conflicting numbers.
Keep what: Provides unified visibility across channels and connects to business outcomes. Cut what: Creates beautiful charts that nobody looks at after the first month.
The Integration Test
A tool that works in isolation is a tool that creates work.
The simplest test: Can this tool receive data from your CRM and send data back to it without manual export/import? If yes, it has a chance of being essential. If no, it's probably creating more problems than it solves.
The more sophisticated test: Map your customer journey and identify every handoff. How many times does data need to move between systems? Every handoff is a potential failure point, a delay, and an opportunity for records to get out of sync.
We wrote more about this in our piece on API integration - the technical approach matters, but the strategic question comes first: should these systems be connected at all, or should one of them just go away?
Calculating Real Cost
License fees are the easy part. The harder calculation:
Time cost - Hours spent administering, troubleshooting, training, and working around tool limitations. Multiply by loaded labor cost.
Opportunity cost - What could your team do if they weren't managing this tool? This is squishy but real.
Integration cost - Development time to build and maintain connections. Support tickets when things break. Data cleanup when syncs fail.
Cognitive cost - Decision fatigue from having too many options. Context-switching between platforms. The organizational knowledge required to know which tool to use when.
A tool with a low sticker price can be wildly expensive when you account for everything surrounding it.
The Consolidation Play
The teams making the most progress aren't optimizing their existing stacks. They're consolidating around fewer, better-connected platforms.
The shift happening now: platforms are expanding their scope. Your marketing automation tool probably has landing page builders now. Your CRM probably has email built in. Your analytics platform probably has attribution models.
Before adding a specialist tool, ask: Can an existing platform do this at 80% of the capability for 0% additional cost?
Usually, yes.
FAQ
How do I get buy-in to cut tools when people are attached to them?
Start with the four-question audit and present the data. Show who's actually using what. Make the cost visible - not just license fees, but the time spent on administration and the integration overhead. People let go of tools more easily when they see what they're really costing.
What if we cut something and realize we needed it?
Most SaaS contracts are monthly or let you resubscribe. The risk of cutting a tool you need is small and recoverable. The risk of keeping tools you don't need is constant and compounding.
How often should we audit our stack?
Quarterly is ideal. At minimum, before any renewal. The worst time to evaluate a tool is when the auto-renewal already processed.
What about tools in the middle - used sometimes, useful occasionally?
"Sometimes useful" usually means "not essential." The question is whether that occasional use justifies the ongoing costs - not just financial, but cognitive and operational. Usually it doesn't.
Want a framework for auditing your specific stack? We put together a marketing technology audit checklist that walks through the evaluation criteria in detail. It's the same process we use with clients before any consolidation project.
[Get the audit checklist →]
