Try this. Write down every piece of software your organization pays for. Not from memory. Go through the credit-card statement and the accounts-payable list and the renewal emails that get filed without being read.
I've done this with a few organizations now and I have never once seen the list come out shorter than the executive director guessed. Usually it's about double. And the shape of it is always the same: several tools doing more or less the same job, bought at different moments by different people for reasons that made sense on the day, all of them still renewing.
There's the donor database, and an email marketing platform that also keeps contacts. A case-management system, and a survey tool that also collects intake. A scheduling app for volunteers, a different one for staff, and a shared calendar that could do both. Three places to store documents. A form builder that one program started using in 2021 and nobody has looked at since. And under all of it, doing the actual connecting, a folder of spreadsheets.
None of this is anyone's fault. A funder required a specific reporting system, so it got added. A new program director arrived with a tool she trusted from her last job, so that got added. The donor database couldn't send the kind of email development wanted, so an email platform got added. Every single addition solved a real problem. The trouble is that nobody owns the total, so the total never gets looked at.
The other way the stack grows is more expensive. An organization buys an enterprise-grade platform for one thing it genuinely needs, and pays for a dozen modules it never opens. Pricing is per seat, so it pays for staff who log in twice a year. The platform promised integrations, but the integrations turn out to need a consultant, so the team goes back to exporting a spreadsheet and importing it somewhere else. The organization is now paying a premium for a tool that was supposed to kill the spreadsheet and has instead become one more place the spreadsheet has to be copied to.
The subscriptions themselves are the cost that's easy to count. Two tools doing one job means one of them is waste. Empty seats are waste. Unopened modules are waste. Per month, each of these is small enough to survive. That's the whole reason they survive. Across a year and across fifteen tools it adds up to a figure that would raise eyebrows at an organization that counts every dollar going to programs.
The cost I'd worry about more is the work the gaps create. Every place two tools overlap is a place the same information gets typed twice. Every place they fail to connect is a place a person has to carry it across. Overlap and gaps are the same problem from two sides: you're paying for tools that don't fit together, and then paying your staff to make them fit.
And there's the cost of not knowing. When contacts live in three systems, nobody actually knows how many supporters you have. When documents live in three places, the current version of a policy is wherever the last person left it. The organization loses the ability to answer simple questions about itself, and that shows up in board meetings, funder reports and audits at exactly the wrong moments.
Two questions I ask about every tool on the list.
What is this the home for? If the honest answer is nothing, if everything in it also lives somewhere else, it's a candidate to go. If the answer is something specific, it stays, and every other tool holding the same information should defer to it.
What happens if it vanished tomorrow? If the answer is that someone would rebuild what it does in a spreadsheet within a week, the organization has already decided the tool isn't earning its keep.
I'll say one thing about the fix, because the obvious version of it is a trap: moving everything into one giant platform. I've watched that reproduce the original problem at a higher price. Consolidation that works means picking a small number of systems, each with one clear responsibility, and connecting them so information moves between them without a person in the middle. Where no reasonable product does what you need, a purpose-built tool is often cheaper over three years than the enterprise subscription it replaces, and it fits the work exactly instead of approximately.
But start with the list. Every subscription, what it costs, who uses it, what it's the home for. Most organizations find that writing it down for the first time makes the next few decisions embarrassingly obvious.