Nobody buys three email tools deliberately
Stack bloat is not a decision. It accumulates — a tool arrives with an acquisition, another is bought by a team that could not wait for procurement, a third is retained because one report depends on it. Each purchase was defensible. The total is not.
The average fifty-person marketing team wastes roughly twenty-two percent of its MarTech budget on redundancy, unused seats and auto-renewals nobody reviewed. The waste is rarely one large mistake. It is a dozen small ones that nobody has ever seen listed together.
List it, score it, see it
The toolkit is deliberately mechanical. Enter every tool you pay for with cost, seat count and renewal date. Answer three questions per tool. The remaining sheets populate themselves.
The three questions do the work: what job does this do, who actually uses it, and what breaks if it disappears. Most stack decisions are obvious once those three answers sit next to each other — and almost nobody has written them down.
Overlap detection and the Cut Score
When two tools do the same job, the toolkit flags both rather than guessing which should go. That is intentional: the correct answer depends on contract timing and switching cost, not on which product is better.
The Cut Score combines usage, redundancy and cost into a single ranking, so the conversation starts from evidence instead of from whoever advocates loudest for their tool.
Renewal timing is the leverage
The Renewal War Room is the sheet that turns analysis into money. Every tool sorted by contract expiry, with CRITICAL flags on anything approaching auto-renewal — because a redundant tool identified two weeks after it renewed is a finding you cannot act on for another year.
The Savings Waterfall then splits the opportunity three ways: eliminate outright, right-size seats, renegotiate. Those are different conversations with different people, and separating them is what makes the number achievable rather than theoretical. A Benchmark Pricing sheet tells you what each category should cost.
What’s inside
- Stack Inventory — cost, seats and renewal date for every tool
- Cut Score and Overlaps — flags both tools when two do the same job
- Renewal War Room — every tool sorted by contract expiry with CRITICAL flags
- Savings Waterfall — eliminate outright, right-size seats, or renegotiate
- Dashboard with a single Stack Health Score from 1 to 10
- Benchmark Pricing sheet so you know what each tool should cost
- Category Reference for classifying anything unusual in your stack
