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Mid-market companies spend 4 to 8 percent of annual revenue on SaaS, manage an average of 291 applications, and leave 53 percent of their purchased licenses unused at any given time, according to Zylo's 2026 SaaS Management Index. The gap between what mid-market teams pay and what they should pay is not a rounding error. It is a structural problem built from unchecked pricing, duplicate tools, and contracts nobody revisits until the invoice jumps.
The figures in this post are drawn from four primary sources published in 2025 and 2026: Zylo's 2026 SaaS Management Index (aggregated telemetry from its SaaS management customer base, including a mid-market segment defined as 50 to 500 employees), Gartner's enterprise software spend research, Vertice's pricing benchmark analysis of more than $75 billion in tracked SaaS spend, and Productiv's SaaS governance research. Where sources gave a range, this post uses the more conservative end and notes the spread. No figure here is estimated or extrapolated beyond what the source reported.
Three separate data sets point to the same conclusion from different angles.
Companies pay wildly different prices for the same software. Vertice's analysis of $75 billion plus in tracked spend found that companies routinely pay close to three times more than their peers for comparable software, with the widest gaps in sales tools (2.99x), ERP (2.92x), and marketing software (2.87x). That is not a difference in package tier. It is the same product, the same feature set, purchased by companies of similar size, at prices nearly 200 percent apart.
The average overpayment on a given deal runs 20 to 25 percent. Gartner's research puts typical software overpayment at 25 percent or more when a buyer negotiates without benchmark data or leverage. This tracks with what procurement teams see in practice: a vendor's first quote is an opening position, not a fair market number, and most buyers accept something close to it because they have no reference point for what a "good" price looks like.
Mid-market is the highest-waste segment, not enterprise. Zylo's 2026 index found that mid-market companies carry 25 to 40 percent of their SaaS spend as redundant or underutilized, a higher waste rate than either smaller companies or large enterprises. Enterprises have dedicated procurement and SaaS management teams. Small companies have few enough tools that sprawl is naturally limited. Mid-market sits in the gap: enough tools and spend to generate real waste, not enough dedicated headcount to catch it.
Layered on top of this, SaaS list prices themselves are rising faster than general inflation. Vendr's 2026 pricing data shows SaaS costs up roughly 11.4 percent year over year, close to five times the 2.7 percent average inflation rate across G7 economies. Mid-market teams are not just overpaying on a flat baseline. That baseline is climbing at renewal, often without anyone flagging the increase before it hits the invoice.
Purchases happen outside a central process. Productiv's research found that 34 percent of SaaS purchases are now made by individual departments rather than through IT or procurement. A sales team buys a prospecting tool, marketing signs up for a design platform, engineering expenses a monitoring service. Each purchase is small enough to avoid scrutiny. None of them show up in a single spend view until someone runs an audit.
Nobody owns license utilization. Zylo's utilization data shows 53 percent of licenses sitting unused across mid-market companies at any point in time. That is not one bad app. It is the norm across a typical 291-app portfolio: seats assigned to employees who left, tiers purchased for a headcount the company never reached, add-on modules nobody activated. Enterprise companies run quarterly access reviews specifically to catch this. Most mid-market teams do not, because no one role is accountable for it.
Renewals happen on the vendor's clock, not the buyer's. Without a centralized contract calendar, a 500-person company with 291 SaaS tools is tracking, on average, a renewal every one to two business days somewhere in its portfolio. Most of those renewals auto-process on 30 or 60-day notice windows that nobody set a reminder for. A vendor that raises its price 8 percent at renewal only needs the buyer to miss the notice window once to collect it.
Pricing benchmark data is unevenly available. Enterprise buyers have Vendr, Vertice, or an internal procurement team with deal history across dozens of vendors. A mid-market finance lead negotiating a single Salesforce or Workday renewal has no comparable reference point unless they go looking for one, and most vendors are not eager to hand over what a similar-sized customer paid.
The 25 to 40 percent waste figure is not evenly distributed across a portfolio. It concentrates in three predictable places: tools purchased below procurement's radar, licenses left active after a role or team changes, and contracts that have auto-renewed at list price for two or more cycles without renegotiation. A team that fixes all three does not need to touch its entire SaaS stack to recover most of the waste. A focused audit of the top 20 to 30 vendors by spend, cross-referenced against actual license utilization and renewal date, typically surfaces the majority of recoverable dollars.
The pricing gap matters as much as the utilization gap. Cutting unused seats addresses waste from tools you already have too much of. It does not touch the 20 to 25 percent average overpayment baked into contracts you actually use and need. Both problems require different fixes: utilization needs an audit and offboarding process, pricing needs benchmark data and a renegotiation trigger before each renewal date.
Companies that keep waste below the mid-market average share a few practices in common. They maintain a single system of record for every active contract, not a spreadsheet someone updates when they remember. They review license utilization on a fixed cadence, typically quarterly, and reclaim seats automatically when usage drops rather than waiting for a renewal to trigger the conversation. They flag every contract 90 days ahead of its renewal or notice date, giving finance enough runway to pull pricing benchmarks and build a negotiation position before the vendor sets the terms. And they treat contract terms, not just the sticker price, as part of the cost: an auto-renewal clause with a 60-day notice window and a built-in 7 percent annual escalation is a different deal than the same list price without those terms, even when the first-year invoice looks identical.
None of this requires enterprise-scale headcount. It requires the visibility that most mid-market teams currently lack: one place where every contract, its renewal date, its actual utilization, and its price history live together.
Based on Zylo's 2026 data, mid-market companies carry 25 to 40 percent of their SaaS budget as redundant or underutilized spend, the highest rate of any company size segment. Separately, Gartner and Vertice data put the typical unnecessary premium on negotiated pricing at 20 to 25 percent, meaning the waste comes from both unused licenses and above-market pricing on tools that are actually needed.
Both, and they are separate problems. Zylo found 53 percent of mid-market licenses sit unused at any given time, which is a utilization problem solved by audits and reclaiming seats. Separately, Vertice found companies pay up to three times more than peers for comparable software, which is a pricing problem solved by benchmark data and renegotiation, not by cutting seats.
Enterprises typically have dedicated procurement and SaaS management functions built specifically to catch this waste. Mid-market companies have enough tools and spend to generate meaningful waste, per Zylo's finding that they average 291 applications, but rarely have a dedicated team or system tracking utilization and renewal terms across that portfolio.
Quarterly license utilization reviews are the most common cadence among companies with below-average waste, paired with a 90-day advance flag on every contract renewal or auto-renewal notice date. Waiting until the invoice arrives means the negotiation window, and often the notice period itself, has already closed.
Start with the top 20 to 30 vendors by annual spend rather than the full portfolio. Cross-reference each against actual license utilization and the next renewal date. Given that mid-market waste concentrates in redundant licenses and stale pricing on frequently used tools, this subset typically captures most of the recoverable spend without requiring a review of all 291 applications at once.
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