DEV Community: Miloš Čech

Built a Chrome extension that auto-detects all your SaaS subscriptions from Gmail/Outlook

Miloš Čech — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 09:25:27 +0000

Tired of manually tracking what your business pays for
software?

We just shipped the CostLoop Email Scanner:

Connects to Gmail or Outlook via OAuth (read-only)
Scans last 12 months of billing emails
Automatically identifies subscriptions
Imports name, cost + billing date into CostLoop
Takes 2 minutes, completely free

No bank account needed. No password sharing.

Install: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/costloop-–-email-scanner/nhklgpepncgmppaoodkmlfohgpkjfbnm

Would love feedback from anyone who tries it 👇

SaaS Audit and SaaS Discovery Guide for Small Business

Miloš Čech — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 10:54:50 +0000

A SaaS audit is a structured spending review of every software subscription your business pays for - what it costs, who uses it, and whether it's earning its place in the budget. This subscription discovery process typically uncovers recurring charges from forgotten tools alongside the known stack. For most small businesses, one thorough audit takes 2-3 hours and uncovers 15-25% of software spend that delivers little or no value. That's not a guess; it's what business owners consistently find when they actually sit down and look. Here's exactly how to run one.

Step 1: Pull all payment sources (30 minutes)

You cannot audit what you haven't found. Start by pulling every statement where software charges could appear. For most small businesses, that means: the main business bank account, the company credit card, any personal cards used for business tools, PayPal if anyone on the team has ever used it for software, and any corporate card accounts belonging to team members who purchase tools independently.

Go back three full months. Three months is enough to catch monthly subscriptions that might have been missed in any one month, and it's a good window for spotting quarterly charges. Annual subscriptions are trickier - you'll need to scan back further or check your email for receipts. Search your inbox for common sender patterns: "receipt," "invoice," "subscription," "billing confirmation," and the names of tools you think you use.

Don't try to organize anything yet. Right now you're just collecting. Write down or paste every charge that looks like a software subscription - even if you're not sure what it is. Unrecognized vendor names are especially important to investigate.

Step 2: Build the master list (45 minutes)

Now organize everything you found into a single working list. Each row should capture: tool name, monthly cost (convert annual charges to monthly by dividing by 12), billing cycle (monthly or annual), the renewal date, who on the team uses it, and which payment method it charges.

This list doesn't need to be beautiful. A simple table in a notes app, a spreadsheet, or a subscription tracker all work. What matters is that every subscription is in one place for the first time. For most businesses that haven't done this before, building the master list reveals a few surprises - tools that never got cancelled after evaluation, very old subscriptions nobody remembers signing up for, and duplicate tools covering the same function.

Here's a template for your list:

Step 3: Check actual usage (30 minutes)

This step separates a real audit from guesswork. For each tool on your list, log into the admin or billing panel and check actual usage data. Most SaaS tools show you last login dates per user, active vs inactive users, and feature usage stats if you're on a higher tier.

What you're looking for: anyone who hasn't logged in for 60+ days on a paid plan is worth examining. Former employees are obvious candidates - if someone left three months ago and their seat is still active, that's pure waste. Also look for users who signed up during an evaluation period and never returned, or users who log in but only use a fraction of the plan's features (which may mean a lower tier is sufficient).

The gap between active users and paid seats is often where the biggest savings hide. A 10-seat Slack Pro plan where only 6 people are actively using it means 4 seats you're paying for but not using. On a $7.25/seat/month plan, that's $29/month wasted on that tool alone. The guide on how to track software subscriptions covers what data to capture per tool to make this step faster in the future.

Step 4: Categorize - active, marginal, or dead (20 minutes)

With your usage data in hand, assign every subscription to one of three buckets. Active means the tool is being used regularly by the people who are paying for it - keep it, note the renewal date, move on. Dead means nobody has logged in for 90+ days, or the tool was never properly adopted - cancel it immediately without further deliberation. Marginal means the tool is used occasionally, or is used by fewer people than are paying for it, or you're not sure if it's earning its place.

Cancel dead tools right now, during this step. Don't put it off. The decision is already made - you're not using it, you don't need it. Find the cancellation page (a web search for "[tool name] cancel subscription" usually gets you there in 30 seconds), cancel, and move on. Keeping dead tools around while you "think about it" is how the waste compounds.

Step 5: Optimize marginal tools (20 minutes)

Marginal tools need a decision, not procrastination. Tool rationalization - picking one tool per job and removing the rest - is the core decision here. For each marginal tool, ask: could we get the same job done with a tool we're already paying for? If yes, migrate and cancel. If no, is there a cheaper plan that covers what we actually use? Check the vendor's pricing page - you might be on a Business tier when a Starter tier covers your needs completely.

Some marginal tools deserve a probation period rather than an immediate cancellation. Set a 30-day timer: either the tool gets used properly in the next month, or it goes. This is especially useful for tools that one person on the team swears they need but hasn't opened in six weeks. Give it a fair shot, set a hard deadline, and make the call.

For any tool renewing in the next 60 days that you're on the fence about, contact the vendor now and ask about pricing flexibility. Renewal conversations are easier than cold negotiations, and many vendors will offer a discount or a temporary pause rather than lose a customer. The post on SaaS spend optimization covers the negotiation approach in more detail.

Step 6: Set up ongoing tracking (10 minutes)

The most important thing you can do after a first audit is make sure you never need to do the full excavation again. Transfer everything that survived the audit - your active and any probationary tools - into a SaaS subscription tracker with renewal reminders. Set alerts for 30 days before each renewal date.

Going forward, the routine is simple: when you add a new tool, add it to the tracker immediately. When you cancel something, remove it. Once a quarter, spend 10–15 minutes reviewing the list to make sure everything still looks right. That quarterly check is what the subscription audit checklistis designed for - it's a much lighter lift than what you just did, and it keeps the list from ever getting this unwieldy again.

A full SaaS audit done once, with proper ongoing tracking afterward, is far more valuable than an annual scramble every year. CostLoop is free to start - add your cleaned-up list today and you'll have the infrastructure to make every future review effortless.

SaaS discovery: finding tools you didn't know you were paying for

A SaaS audit is a form of SaaS discovery - the process of surfacing every tool your business pays for, including ones nobody authorized or remembers signing up for. The two terms describe the same activity: going from a fragmented, incomplete picture of your software stack to a verified, complete inventory. If you have run through the steps in this post, you have completed a SaaS discovery exercise.

SaaS discovery matters because shadow IT is common in small businesses. Employees sign up for tools on personal cards and expense them later (or never). Free trials convert to paid plans after 14 or 30 days with no action required from anyone. Former employees leave, but their licenses keep running because nobody flagged the accounts during offboarding. Each of these patterns creates subscriptions your business is paying for that nobody has explicitly decided to keep.

The audit process described in this post is the SaaS discovery process. Step 1 - pulling all payment sources - is where most hidden subscriptions surface. Step 2 - building the master list - is where you consolidate what you found into a single verified inventory. If you want to go deeper on the shadow IT dimension specifically, the guide on shadow IT for small business covers the causes and prevention in detail. For a step-by-step walkthrough of finding every subscription from scratch, how to find all company subscriptions covers the full discovery process.

SaaS visibility: what you gain from completing an audit

SaaS visibility is the outcome of a completed audit: knowing exactly what tools your business pays for, what each costs, when each renews, and who uses it. It is the difference between managing software spend deliberately and discovering it reactively.

Before an audit, most small businesses are in a reactive state - fragmented records spread across multiple bank accounts and card statements, no single person with a complete picture, and renewals discovered after charges have already landed. After an audit paired with ongoing tracking, the state flips: a proactive, complete picture where decisions get made before charges fire rather than after.

The practical payoff of SaaS visibility goes beyond cost savings. When you know exactly what you have, you can onboard new team members to the right tools immediately, remove access cleanly when someone leaves, and avoid buying duplicate tools because you can see what already exists in the stack. For a broader look at managing software spend once you have visibility, the SaaS spend management guide covers the ongoing process. For choosing the right tool to maintain that visibility day-to-day, the best subscription tracker for small business compares the main options.

Frequently Asked Questions

*How long does a SaaS audit take for a small business?
*
For most small businesses with 10-30 subscriptions, a thorough SaaS audit takes 2-3 hours spread across a morning. The bulk of that is pulling payment statements and building the initial list. The actual review and decision-making goes quickly once you have everything in front of you.

*How much can a SaaS audit save a small business?
*
On average, businesses find 15-25% of their software spend is wasted on unused, duplicate, or over-priced tools. For a business spending $800/month on software, that's $120-$200 per month - $1,440-$2,400 per year.

*What should I look for when auditing SaaS tools?
*
Focus on three things: tools nobody is actively using (check last login dates in admin panels), duplicate tools that do the same job, and plans with paid features or seats you've grown out of. Any tool in those three categories is a candidate for cancellation or downgrade.

*How often should a small business do a SaaS audit?
*
A full audit once a year is recommended for most small businesses. Pair it with a lighter quarterly review (15 minutes, just checking the list and upcoming renewals) to catch things between audits.

*What is SaaS discovery?
*
SaaS discovery is the process of finding every software tool your business uses and pays for - including unauthorized tools employees signed up for independently, forgotten subscriptions that never got cancelled, and trials that converted to paid plans without anyone noticing. A SaaS audit IS the SaaS discovery process: both terms describe the same activity of surfacing your complete software inventory from scratch.

*What is SaaS visibility and why does it matter?
*
SaaS visibility means knowing exactly what tools your business pays for, what each one costs, when each renews, and who uses it. Without it, you are reactive - discovering charges after they appear on bank statements. With it, you make decisions before renewals fire, catch unused tools before they auto-renew, and maintain an accurate total of what your software actually costs each month.

CostLoop vs Notion: Which Should You Use for Subscription Tracking?

Miloš Čech — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 08:55:15 +0000

Notion vs Costloop: Which One Should You Use for Subscription Tracking?

Notion is flexible. You can use it for almost anything: docs, wikis, project boards, dashboards, SOPs, and internal databases.

That flexibility is exactly why many teams try to track SaaS subscriptions in Notion.

And for a small list of tools, it works fine.

But subscription tracking has a few specific problems that Notion was never really built to solve.

That is where CostLoop comes in.

What Notion is great at

Notion is strong when you need a flexible workspace for company information and internal processes.

It works well for:

Collaborative docs and wikis
Project and task management databases
Custom internal tools and dashboards
Company knowledge and SOPs
Kanban boards, calendars, and linked databases
Combining subscription data with vendor notes and SLAs

Notion is great at organizing information.

But tracking subscriptions is not just about storing information.

It is also about remembering renewal dates, calculating accurate spend, finding unused tools, storing invoices, and making sure the right people get alerted before money leaves the account.

What CostLoop is built for

CostLoop is built specifically for recurring SaaS and software subscription tracking.

It helps teams manage:

Recurring SaaS and software subscriptions
Renewal alerts with a 30-day email warning before each renewal
Accurate monthly and annual spend across multiple currencies
Cancellation links and invoices for each subscription
Subscription health scores to spot risky or unused tools
Team visibility without requiring a Notion workspace seat

Put simply:

Notion tracks things. CostLoop tracks subscriptions.

Where Notion starts to struggle

Notion’s database feature is genuinely flexible.

You can build a subscription list in Notion. You can add vendors, renewal dates, owners, costs, notes, invoice links, and cancellation instructions.

For a handful of tools, that setup can be enough.

But once the list grows, the cracks start to show.

1. Notion does not send native email renewal alerts

Notion can remind you inside Notion. It can also send some notifications depending on your setup.

But it does not have a native database workflow that sends a 30-day renewal warning by email to an external stakeholder.

That means if your finance lead, operations person, or founder is not living inside Notion, they may miss the renewal reminder.

To solve this, you usually need Zapier, Make, or another automation tool.

That adds:

Another account to manage
Another monthly cost
Another workflow to maintain
Another thing that can break when a database field changes

CostLoop handles this automatically.

Set the renewal date once, and the 30-day email reminder goes out without needing a separate automation workflow.

2. Multi-currency spend tracking is manual in Notion

Many teams pay for software in more than one currency.

You might have some subscriptions in USD, others in EUR, GBP, or another local currency.

In Notion, you can store those amounts, but Notion does not perform live currency conversion out of the box.

That means your totals are either:

Manually converted
Based on stale exchange rates
Dependent on an external automation
Split across multiple manual fields

This becomes messy fast.

CostLoop is built to show accurate monthly and annual spend across multiple currencies, so you can understand what your software stack actually costs.

3. Notion has no subscription health score

A subscription list is useful.

But a subscription list does not tell you which tools are risky, unused, duplicated, or worth reviewing.

In Notion, you have to scan each row manually and make the judgment yourself.

That might work when you have 6 tools.

It does not work well when you have 20, 40, or 80.

CostLoop includes a subscription health score to help identify subscriptions that may need attention before they quietly keep renewing.

4. Invoice storage can become awkward

If you want to attach invoices directly to each subscription in Notion, you may run into file upload limits depending on your plan.

For a team already paying for multiple SaaS tools, upgrading a workspace just to store subscription invoices is not always an easy sell.

CostLoop is designed around the subscription record itself, so invoices, cancellation links, renewal dates, and key vendor details stay together.

5. Notion works best when everyone has access

Notion is most useful when the team already uses it.

But if someone only needs visibility into SaaS costs, renewals, or invoices, giving them access to a full Notion workspace can be overkill.

CostLoop gives teams subscription visibility without requiring everyone to become a Notion user.

That matters when finance, operations, founders, and team leads all need visibility into software spend.

So which one should you use?

Use Notion if you want to combine your subscription list with docs, vendor notes, SOPs, project context, and internal knowledge.

Use CostLoop if you want:

Automatic renewal alerts
Accurate multi-currency spend tracking
Subscription health scores
Cancellation links in one place
Invoice storage per subscription
Team visibility without extra Notion seats

Many teams can use both.

Notion can stay your company wiki and internal workspace.

CostLoop can handle the dedicated subscription tracking.

You can also export CostLoop data to CSV any time if you want to reference it inside Notion.

They are not trying to do the same job.

Notion is a flexible workspace.

CostLoop is a dedicated subscription tracker.

Final takeaway

If you are tracking subscriptions in Notion and only have a few tools, you may be fine for now.

But if you are worried about missed renewals, messy currency totals, forgotten invoices, or unused tools quietly renewing, Notion is probably no longer enough.

Try CostLoop alongside your existing Notion setup.

Free plan. No credit card. 5-minute setup.

SaaS Offboarding and License Management: What Happens When Staff Leave

Miloš Čech — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 12:14:00 +0000

When someone leaves your company, HR processes kick in - final paycheck, equipment return, maybe an exit interview. What usually doesn't happen: SaaS offboarding. Most businesses skip a systematic review of every SaaS account that person had access to. The result is that departed employees often retain active logins to company tools for months, and the company keeps paying for those seats the whole time.

This isn't a negligence problem. It's a visibility problem. Most small businesses don't have a clear record of which tools each person uses, who owns the vendor relationship, or which email address is the account admin. When someone leaves, there's no checklist to follow because nobody built one.

The consequences are two-sided. One is financial - you're paying for software a ghost employee isn't using. The other is a security risk that's easy to dismiss until something goes wrong. Let's cover both, and then walk through a practical offboarding process you can actually implement.

The Cost Problem: What You're Actually Paying For

Consider a 12-person company with a typical SaaS stack: Slack at $7.25/seat, Notion at $8/seat, GitHub at $4/seat, Figma at $12/seat, a project management tool at $10/seat, and a CRM at $15/seat. That's $56.25 per person per month, just for those six tools.

One person leaves. If nobody acts, that's $56.25/month in wasted spend. If it takes 4 months to catch - which is roughly the industry average - you've spent $225 on access for someone who no longer works there. Now multiply that across a year with two or three departures, and the total sits comfortably in the hundreds or low thousands of dollars.

Annual-billed tools make this worse. You pay the full year upfront, and if someone leaves in month 3, you've pre-paid nine months of a seat you can't use unless you can reassign it. This is one reason why annual vs monthly SaaS billing matters more than most people think - annual billing saves money, but only if your team is stable.

The Security Problem: Former Employees with Active Accounts

An active account belonging to a former employee isn't just waste. It's an open door. The severity depends on what that account can access, but the scenarios range from uncomfortable to genuinely serious:

A former sales rep can still log into the CRM and see current pipeline, customer data, and contact lists
A former developer retains read/write access to source code repositories
A former account manager can download client files from shared storage
Someone who left on bad terms could delete data, export it, or simply lurk
Most of the time, nothing bad happens. Former employees move on. But "most of the time" isn't a security posture. And many data breaches that investigators trace back to insider access started not with malicious insiders, but with lingering credentials nobody remembered to revoke.

A Practical SaaS Offboarding Checklist

The goal is to have a documented process that you run every time someone leaves - not a 40-step enterprise procedure, just a clear sequence that covers the high-risk items first.

Which SaaS account types need different handling during employee departure
Not all SaaS accounts are equal. Here's how to think about each type:

The Hardest Part: Tools You Didn't Know About

The offboarding steps above only work if you already know what tools an employee uses. In most small businesses, people sign up for tools independently - a designer grabs a trial of a prototyping tool, a marketer subscribes to a social scheduler, a developer adds a monitoring service. None of it goes through a central procurement process.

When that person leaves, nobody knows those tools exist. They keep billing to the company card. The seat stays open. And if the subscription was set up under the employee's personal email (which happens more often than anyone admits), you can't even access the account to cancel it.

This is the core problem that good how to track software subscriptions solves. Not the auditing itself, but the visibility. If you have a record of every tool, who signed up for it, and which billing email it uses, offboarding becomes a filter operation - pull up everything assigned to this person, work through the list, done.

Without that record, offboarding is a guessing game.

Building IT Offboarding Into Your Process for License Recovery

The companies that handle SaaS offboarding well don't have better IT teams. They have a documented checklist that HR and managers run through every time someone leaves. It typically takes 30–60 minutes for a complete offboarding, which is well worth the security and cost benefits.

A few things that make this easier:

Use SSO everywhere you can. When you provision Google Workspace or Okta, any tool that supports SSO login loses access the moment you disable the account. That one action covers 60–70% of your tool stack.
Record tool ownership at onboarding. When someone joins, document which tools they'll own or have admin access to. That list becomes the offboarding checklist when they leave.
Have a shared subscription record. Whether that's a dedicated tool like CostLoop or a well-maintained internal doc, you need somewhere to look that shows all active subscriptions and their owners. This also makes software license management far simpler when the next departure happens.
Employee transitions are stressful. The last thing you want is to discover three months later that a former employee's accounts are still active - both for the bill and for what might have happened since. A one-hour investment in a proper offboarding process pays for itself the first time it prevents even a single overlooked subscription from running for an extra quarter.

If you don't have a subscription record yet, start one today. It doesn't have to be complete on day one - just capture what you know now, and add to it as you discover new tools. By the time the next person leaves, you'll have something to work from.

Offboarding and SaaS license management: the seat reclamation problem

Every employee offboarding is a SaaS license management event. When someone leaves without their licenses being revoked, you continue paying for access that serves no one. The seat is allocated but empty - and still billing.

For per-seat tools (Notion, Slack, Figma, and similar), each unrevoked seat is pure waste. At $10-30 per seat per month across 5-10 tools, a single missed offboarding can cost $600-3,600 per year. License recovery - reclaiming and either cancelling or making available for seat reallocation to a new hire - is the direct financial benefit of a thorough offboarding. The cost compounds with each departure where this step is skipped.

The fix: make license revocation a required step in the offboarding checklist, not an optional afterthought. Every tool the departing employee had access to should have their seat removed or reassigned within 24 hours of their last day. The SaaS license management guide covers how to build and maintain a seat inventory so this step is fast to execute. For a closer look at the cost of seats nobody uses, the unused software seats guide quantifies the impact across common tool categories.

Frequently asked questions

What happens to SaaS accounts when an employee leaves?
Nothing happens automatically. The account stays active, the seat remains allocated, and the company keeps paying for it. In some cases the departing employee may still have login access, which is a security risk. You need to manually revoke access and deprovision the seat for each tool.

How long do businesses typically keep paying for ex-employee accounts?
Research suggests the average is 3-6 months. Annual-billed tools are the worst - you pay for the full year upfront, and if someone leaves in month 2, you lose 10 months of that seat unless you can reassign it.

What's the security risk of not revoking SaaS access after someone leaves?
A former employee with active credentials can still log in to company tools. This could mean accessing customer data in a CRM, reading confidential documents in a project management tool, or downloading code from a source control system.

What's the most important SaaS account to offboard first?
Email and identity providers (Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Okta) should be the first accounts you revoke, because they often control SSO access to many other tools. Once email is deactivated, any tool that uses Sign in with Google or SSO will also be locked out automatically.

What happens to SaaS licenses when an employee leaves?
Nothing automatically. Licenses continue renewing unless manually revoked. This is why offboarding must include a license revocation step for every SaaS tool the employee had access to.

How do I manage SaaS subscriptions during employee offboarding?
List every tool the employee had access to, revoke access and reduce seat count within 24 hours of their last day, and reassign owner in your subscription tracker if they owned any subscriptions. Tools connected via SSO lose access when you disable the identity account; tools with independent logins must be revoked manually.

I’m building a simple SaaS subscription tracker for small teams

Miloš Čech — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 13:29:26 +0000

Most small teams don’t notice forgotten SaaS subscriptions until they renew.
That’s the problem I’m working on with CostLoop, a simple tool for tracking subscriptions, renewal dates, vendors, license counts, cancellation links, invoices, contracts, and related documents in one place.
The idea came from a common pattern I kept seeing: teams start with a spreadsheet, Notion page, calendar reminders, or just memory.
That works for a while.
Then the team grows, people buy tools independently, invoices get buried in emails, unused seats keep getting paid for, and nobody knows who owns what.
What CostLoop tracks
The current version focuses on:
subscriptions
vendors
renewal dates
monthly and yearly costs
license counts
cancellation links
invoices and contracts
related documents
team ownership
The goal is not to build heavy procurement software. Small teams usually don’t need that.
They need a clear answer to:
What are we paying for?
Who owns it?
When does it renew?
How do we cancel it?
Where are the documents?
Stack
The stack is simple:
Next.js
Supabase
Stripe
Tailwind CSS
I’m trying not to overbuild it. The biggest risk with a product like this is adding too many dashboards, reports, and settings before proving that teams will actually keep the data updated.
What I’m still figuring out
A few questions I’m working through:
Should subscription creation be super fast, or should it collect more detailed data?
Are renewal reminders enough, or does each subscription need a clear internal owner?
Are cancellation links more useful than cost reports?
How important are document uploads compared to basic tracking?
What would make a small team actually maintain this every month?
I’m looking for feedback from founders, developers, operators, and small teams managing multiple SaaS tools.
How do you currently track subscriptions and renewals?
And what breaks most often: missed renewals, unused seats, scattered invoices, unclear ownership, or something else?
CostLoop has a 14-day free trial with no credit card required if anyone wants to test it.
Codes before signup:
Business: TEST2026BUSINESS
Pro: TEST2026PRO

What Actually Happens to Your SaaS Subscriptions When a Developer Leaves Your Team

Miloš Čech — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 07:55:01 +0000

A developer leaves your team. You do the usual offboarding — remove GitHub access, revoke AWS IAM credentials, disable their Google Workspace account.

But what about the 15 other tools they had access to?
This is the offboarding gap most small engineering teams never close - and it costs real money.

The Problem
Most SaaS subscriptions are seat-based. When someone joins, you add a seat. When someone leaves, that seat doesn't cancel itself.
Unless someone actively goes into each tool, finds that person's account, and removes them — their seat keeps billing. Indefinitely.
The tools most likely to have orphaned seats after an engineering departure:

Design tools (Figma, Sketch) — developers often have view or comment access
Monitoring and observability (Datadog, New Relic, Sentry) — direct seat licenses
Project management (Linear, Jira, Notion) — team workspace seats
Communication tools (Slack, Notion, Loom) — per-seat billing
Cloud infrastructure consoles — not always seat-based but often have billing implications
API tools (Postman, Insomnia) — team plan seats
Documentation (Confluence, Gitbook) — per-seat or per-editor billing

The Real Cost
For a team of 10 engineers with an average SaaS stack, a single departed engineer leaves behind approximately $150-300/month in active seats across all tools — assuming nobody audits them.
Over a year, that's $1,800-3,600 per departed team member. Most teams have 2-5 departures per year.

The Fix — An Offboarding Checklist
When any engineer leaves, run this immediately:

□ Google Workspace — deactivate account
□ GitHub — remove org membership
□ AWS/GCP/Azure — revoke IAM access
□ Slack — deactivate user
□ Linear/Jira — remove from workspace
□ Figma — remove from org
□ Notion — remove from workspace
□ Sentry — remove member
□ Datadog/New Relic — deactivate user
□ Postman — remove from team
□ Any tool listed in your subscription tracker

That last line matters. If you don't have a central list of every tool your team pays for, you can't run a complete offboarding. You'll miss things.

The Systemic Fix
A proper offboarding process requires knowing what you're offboarding from. That means having a subscription inventory — every tool, every seat count, every owner.

CostLoop handles this at the subscription level — it maintains a central record of every tool with seat ownership, renewal dates, and costs. When someone leaves, you have an instant checklist of every tool to review.

Free plan available. No bank connection needed.

The uncomfortable reality: most teams only discover orphaned seats during a subscription audit, months or years after the person left. The audit pays for itself in the first 30 minutes.

SaaS Subscription Sprawl: Why Your Team's Tool Budget Keeps Growing Without Anyone Noticing

Miloš Čech — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 08:57:06 +0000

Every team has a graveyard of subscriptions.

Tools that made sense at the time, auto-renewed quietly, and nobody cancelled. Not because the team is careless — because there was no system to catch it.

If you've ever found a charge on your company card for something you stopped using six months ago, you already know what I'm talking about.

How Tool Sprawl Actually Happens

The pattern is predictable:

Developer joins the team. They sign up for a tool they liked at their last job.
Trial ends. Auto-renews. Nobody notices because it's only $19/month.
Developer leaves or moves to a different project.
Tool sits unused. The card keeps getting charged.
Nobody cancels because nobody knows the login, the cancellation URL, or whether the tool is still being used somewhere.

Repeat this across 6 developers and 3 years and you've got a real problem.

The Specific Pain Points for Dev Teams

Unused seats in tier-priced tools

GitHub, Figma, Datadog, Linear, Notion — all of these price by seat. When a team shrinks or a contractor finishes, those seats don't disappear automatically. Someone has to go in and remove them.

That "someone" is usually nobody.

Overlapping tools

How many teams are paying for both Slack and Teams? Both Jira and Linear? Both Notion and Confluence?

This happens during migrations. The old tool keeps getting paid for months after the new one launches because nobody formally decommissioned it.

Annual plans renewed without review

Monthly charges are visible. Annual renewals are not — until they hit.

A $2,400/year tool renewing on a random Tuesday in October is easy to miss if nobody set a reminder.

Infra costs that look fixed but aren't

AWS, GCP, Heroku — these aren't exactly "subscriptions" but they behave like them from a budget perspective. They compound. Unused environments, old deployments, forgotten staging servers. The monthly bill grows and nobody tracks which project owns which cost.

What a Useful Tracking System Looks Like

The minimum viable system has these columns:

Field	Why it matters
Tool name	Obvious
Owner	Who makes the renewal decision
Monthly cost	Normalized to monthly even for annual plans
Renewal date	So you can review before being charged
Cancellation URL	So you can actually cancel it
Usage status	Active / unused / under review

The renewal date and cancellation URL columns are what most people skip — and what matters most when you're trying to make a quick decision before a charge hits.

The Review Cadence That Works

Monthly: Check what's renewing in the next 30 days.

Quarterly: Review the full tool list. Ask: is this still being used? Could we use something we already pay for? Is there a cheaper tier?

On offboarding: Every time someone leaves the team, audit their tools. Reassign ownership or cancel.

What We Built

We got frustrated maintaining this in a spreadsheet — it went stale too quickly and had no reminder system — so we built CostLoop.

It tracks subscriptions, renewal dates, owners, costs, cancellation links, invoices, and notes. You get renewal reminders before charges happen. You can spot unused seats and duplicate tools. No bank connection, no integrations — just add what you pay for and keep it up to date.

It's free to start and works for solo developers, small teams, and agencies.

→ costloop.app

If you're still on a spreadsheet for this, it's worth 10 minutes to migrate. The reminder system alone has saved us from several surprise renewals.

What does your team use to track subscriptions? Curious what setups people have — drop it in the comments.

Try CostLoop free at costloop.app — built for developers and small teams.

I built a subscription tracker for small businesses - here's what it does and how it's built

Miloš Čech — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 12:04:02 +0000

What is CostLoop?

CostLoop is a subscription and recurring cost tracker for small businesses, freelancers, and startup teams. One dashboard for every software tool you're paying for - with renewal alerts, cancellation link storage, and a health score that surfaces waste automatically.

The core problem: small businesses manage 10-30 SaaS tools simultaneously with no central view of spend. Renewals happen unnoticed. Unused seats accumulate. Nobody knows the cancellation URL when they need it quickly.

What it does

Subscription tracking - name, cost, billing cycle, renewal date, owner, status, category
Email renewal reminders - alerts at 7, 14, or 30 days before each charge. Daily job via Resend.
Cancellation link storage - per subscription, so cancelling takes 30 seconds
Health score (0-100) - surfaces unused seats, duplicate tools, overdue renewals, trials about to convert
Cost dashboard - monthly spend, annual forecast, budget tracking, spend by category
Document storage - attach invoices and contracts to each subscription record

What we just shipped

CSV import - bulk add up to 500 subscriptions. Download template, fill in, upload. Validation report before commit. Useful for anyone migrating from a spreadsheet.

Multi-currency - 40+ currencies, daily exchange rate updates. Dashboard totals convert to home currency; original currency preserved per record.

Dark mode - system preference detection + manual toggle.

Business plan with team workspaces - owner/viewer roles, invite by email, subscription ownership assignment. All queries workspace-scoped.

Health score improvements - overdue renewals now weighted more heavily. Cancellation link presence gives bonus credit.

Stack

Next.js, Supabase, Stripe, Resend, Vercel. Solo founder based in Oslo.

No bank/card integrations by design - fully manual, which keeps it fast and private.

Free to start at costloop.app. Happy to talk through any implementation details.

How to Track Software Subscriptions Before They Drain Your Budget

Miloš Čech — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 09:56:44 +0000

I used to manage my business subscriptions in a spreadsheet.

It worked — until it didn't.

The problem with spreadsheets for subscription tracking is that they don't do anything. They store data. But they don't remind you that Figma renews in 5 days. They don't tell you that you're paying for 4 seats when 2 people left. They don't store the cancellation URL so you can actually cancel something before it renews.

That's why I built CostLoop — a subscription tracker designed specifically for small businesses, freelancers, and indie makers who want visibility into their recurring costs without connecting bank accounts or dealing with bloated expense software.

What it tracks

Every recurring software subscription (name, cost, billing cycle, owner, category)
Renewal dates — with email reminders sent automatically before each one
Cancellation links stored per subscription (this one sounds small, it's not)
Invoices and contracts attached to each record
Monthly spend, annual forecast, and budget usage in one dashboard

The health score

This is the feature I find most useful day-to-day. CostLoop calculates a 0–100 health score for your subscription stack. It surfaces:

Unused seats (paying for users who aren't using the tool)
Duplicate tools (two tools doing the same thing)
Trials about to convert to paid

For solo devs and small teams, this is where the savings usually hide.

Why no bank integration?

This is intentional. No read access to your accounts, no OAuth to your bank, no card number entry. You add subscriptions manually. This keeps it simple, private, and fast to set up. Most people can get their full subscription list into CostLoop in under 10 minutes.

Try it

Free plan available — no time limit, no credit card required.

👉 costloop.app

Would love feedback from the dev.to community — especially if you've tried other approaches to this problem.

I Built a Subscription Tracker After Getting Blindsided by 3 Auto-Renewals - Here's What I Learned

Miloš Čech — Thu, 28 May 2026 07:31:40 +0000

Running a small operation means you're signing up for tools constantly. A new API service here, a design tool there, a project management platform someone on the team wanted to try.
Nobody keeps track. Until they do.
The Problem I Was Trying to Solve
Last year I got hit by three auto-renewals in one month for tools I'd either forgotten about or stopped using. None of them were huge individually but together they were real money — and more frustrating than the cost was the fact that I simply hadn't seen them coming.
I looked for a simple subscription tracker. What I found was:

Enterprise tools like Zylo and Torii — built for IT departments managing hundreds of licenses, priced accordingly
Spreadsheet templates — work for a week, go stale within a month
Tools requiring bank connections — I wasn't comfortable giving card access to something managing my recurring costs

So I built CostLoop.
What I Built
CostLoop is a lightweight subscription tracker for small teams and solopreneurs. The core features:

Manual entry (no bank connection — intentional design decision)
Renewal reminders sent to your email before each charge
Cancellation link storage — you save it once, find it instantly
Health score that flags unused tools, duplicate services, and trials about to convert
Invoice storage per subscription
Total monthly and annual spend in one dashboard

What I Learned From Early Users

The cancellation link feature won.
I thought the health score would be the standout feature. It wasn't. The feature that got the strongest reactions was storing the cancellation link. People lose these constantly. When they finally decide to cancel something, the page is buried six menus deep and they spend 20 minutes hunting for it.
Privacy matters more than convenience for this use case.
Every time I mentioned adding bank sync as a future feature I got pushback. People don't want to hand over financial credentials to manage subscriptions. Manual entry isn't a limitation — for this audience it's a feature.
The gap in the market is real.
Nobody is building for the 2–10 person team or solo founder in this space. The enterprise tools are genuinely excellent at what they do. But if you're a freelancer or a small startup, they're total overkill. That gap is where CostLoop lives.
The Technical Side

Built with privacy-first principles — no bank connections, no financial data stored, GDPR compliant. Hosted on Cloudflare with full SSL, HSTS, and security headers. Achieved 100/100 on PageSpeed and A+ on SSL Labs across all four servers.

Where It's At Now
Still early. Growing steadily. Free plan is genuinely free — not a 14-day trial.
If you're building something in this space or have thoughts on the approach, I'd love to hear them in the comments.

costloop.app