Five Ways to Save on SaaS

Back in 2011 when we first heard that “software is eating the world”, global spending on SaaS was at an almost quaint 12 billion. In the years since, if it hasn’t eaten the world, software has certainly eaten your budget, with SaaS spend growing more than 25x to reach almost 300 billion in 2025. That’s a sustained annual growth rate of more than 20%. If you’re looking to trim some of the fat from your ever-increasing SaaS budget, you’re not alone. But to succeed, you need to combine multiple strategies to identify savings both at the contract level, and at the individual license level.

Lumos is the first Autonomous Identity Platform that discovers all your apps and identities and puts access on autopilot. Here are five ways that Lumos customers can use Autonomous Identity to tighten their SaaS budget and reduce wasted spend.

1. Remove unused licenses
2. Use time-based access
3. Fine-tune birthright access
4. Prevent Shadow IT
5. Don’t miss your renewals

1 - Remove unused licenses

In theory, one of the simplest ways to reduce SaaS spend is to remove licenses that aren’t being used. However, at scale this is often difficult in practice. How do you know which licenses are being underutilized?

Lumos automatically collects usage data for your apps so that you can identify unused licenses and many Lumos integrations allow for automated deprovisioning. This makes it simple to set up an “inactivity workflow” in Lumos. All you need to do is select how many days of inactivity should trigger deprovisioning.

If you don’t want to completely deprovision users, you can also use this automated process to downgrade users to a cheaper or free tier. Read more about setting up

2 - Use time-based access

The question of how many licenses you need for a given app is often tricky to answer. Some employees will need to use the app every day and obviously need a dedicated license. Others won’t need to use the app at all. But what about employees that need the app only occasionally? A dedicated license might be wasteful, but without a very efficient process to assign licenses when needed, your employees will end up blocked waiting for access, and manually adding, and then revoking temporary licenses can cost you more in IT resources than just buying permanent licences.

Lumos allows you to use pre-approval rules to grant short-term access to an app that is automatically removed when the term expires. 

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As an example, imagine that you have 100 employees and you’re buying licenses for an app. 20 employees will need to use the app every day but others only need to use the app once or twice in a quarter. Instead of buying 100 licenses, you can:

• Buy 40 licenses
• Allocate 20 licenses permanently to daily users and use the other 20 to create a pool of temporary licenses.
• Create a rule to “pre-approve” access to the app for 7 days at a time.

This way, employees can instantly receive access to the app when needed without creating an IT ticket. After a week, their license returns to the pool. Over time, you may find you need to add a few additional licenses to your pool if it’s frequently empty. Or you might find you can get by with even fewer.

Read more about pre-approval workflows here.

3 - Fine-tune birthright access

A significant chunk of an employees access to SaaS apps is granted on day one of employment, and once granted birthright access is rarely removed, so you can easily waste money on under-utilized apps. Lumos can help you continuously update and improve your birthright policies by keeping track of what employees request after joining, and what apps they actually use the most. 

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For example, if all employees in the Sales group get App A as part of their birthright access, but only 75% use it on a monthly basis, Lumos can suggest removing it from birthright access. On the other hand, if 90% of the same group of users frequently file access requests for App B after joining, Lumos can save you manual provisioning effort by adding App B to birthright access to Sales. Over time, small tweaks like this can add up to big savings. You can also streamline adoption of new apps by letting Lumos suggest who might need them based on past usage patterns.

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4 - Prevent Shadow IT

A high proportion of the apps purchased and used by companies are now procured and managed by departments other than IT, or even purchased independently by employees themselves, and expensed later. A key competency for managing SaaS spend is to actually know what you’re spending on SaaS across the organization.

Lumos has four different channels for discovering apps:

• Direct integration through Lumos
• Discovery via an IdP or SSO provider like Okta or Google Workspace
• Email subject line integrations to identify signup and password reset emails
• Integration with spend platforms to identify payments to Saas providers

By bringing together these four channels of discovery, Lumos shows you all the apps being used in your organization. Not just those provisioned officially by IT. With this knowledge you can save by:

• Bring necessary apps into the fold and minimize spend using the license management techniques above.
• Remove unneeded, risky, or wasteful apps.
• Rationalize apps where different departments have purchased two or more different apps for the same use case.

5 - Don’t miss your renewals

Finally, don’t get caught off guard by your contract rollover dates and get caught by auto-renew clauses. Lumos manages all of your vendor agreements in one place, including your internal contract owner, and any opt-out and renewal dates. Lumos can automatically notify contract owners as key dates approach so you don’t miss an opportunity to cancel or renegotiate an underutilized contract.

Get full value from your SaaS spend

By combining these techniques, Lumos customers like Checkr have identified immediate savings totalling more than the cost of Lumos! And by efficiently managing licenses, even more savings can be unlocked over time. To see how Lumos can help you cut your SaaS bill, schedule a personalized demo today.