The Tool Audit: Cutting Your Martech Bill Without Breaking Anything
Half of what your stack can do goes unused. Here is how to find the dead subscriptions and cancel them safely.
CTFM Team
Nobody sets out to build a bloated stack. It accumulates. A trial that became a subscription, a tool bought for one campaign in 2024, a seat for someone who left, two products that overlap because two people bought them in the same quarter.
Then somebody looks at the total and asks what all of it is for. This is how to answer that question in an afternoon, and cancel things without breaking a process you did not know existed.
Gartner's 2025 Marketing Technology Survey put average martech utilisation at 49% — organisations using roughly half of what their stacks are capable of. The same research programme has recorded this figure moving around considerably over the years, from 58% in 2020 down to 33% in 2023 and back up since.
Gartner's 2026 CMO Spend Survey, covering 401 CMOs, separately found martech's share of marketing budget at a five-year low of 19.4%, down from 26.6% in 2021, even though most respondents said they intended to invest more in technology.
Both are self-reported surveys weighted towards larger organisations, and "utilisation" is a judgement respondents make about themselves rather than a measured quantity. Treat them as evidence that under-use is normal and widespread, not as a target for your own stack.
The useful conclusion is that if half your tools feel underused, you are not badly run. You are typical. That makes this a normal maintenance job rather than an admission of failure, which matters, because embarrassment is why these audits get avoided.
You cannot audit what you cannot see, and the tools costing you the most are usually the ones nobody remembers.
Pull the card statements
Twelve months, every card and payment account. This finds more than asking people does, because nobody remembers a small monthly charge.
Check the app connections on your main platforms
Your website, ecommerce platform, ad accounts and email tool all list connected applications. Anything with access is part of your stack, whether or not you are paying for it.
Ask each person what they open weekly
Not what they have access to. What they actually open. The gap between the two is where the money is.
Look for the free tools holding real data
Not a cost, but a risk. A free tool holding your customer list is a dependency even though it never appears on a statement.
For each tool, one line: what job it does, who runs it, what it costs annually, and when it renews.
Load-bearing
Something breaks immediately if it stops. Your website, email tool, CRM. Leave alone, but check you are not on the wrong tier.
Useful but overlapping
Two tools doing most of the same job. The biggest savings live here, and so does the most work.
Nobody opens it
Bought for a reason that has passed. Usually cancellable immediately.
Holds data we need
Barely used, but has history in it. Export first, then cancel. Never the other way round.
The two things that go wrong when cancelling
Something invisible depended on it. A form on a page nobody looks at, a tracking script feeding a report, an automation triggering off it. The tool is dead and the process it silently supported dies with it, quietly, and you find out weeks later.
The data goes with it. Many vendors delete your data after a grace period. Reviews, conversation history, form submissions, campaign records. Export everything first, even if you are certain you will not need it. The export costs an hour; recreating the history is impossible.
For anything you are not certain about, use a staged approach rather than a straight cancellation.
Stage
Action
What you learn
1
Export all data
Whether an export even exists
2
Remove all but one seat
Whether anyone complains
3
Downgrade to the cheapest tier
Whether the expensive features were real
4
Disconnect integrations
What breaks, while you can still undo it
5
Cancel at renewal
The saving
Stage four is where the surprises happen, and it is much safer to disconnect while the account still exists than to discover the dependency after deletion.
Two cheap wins before you cancel anything
Ask for annual pricing on tools you are definitely keeping. Most vendors discount meaningfully for annual commitment. If you are certain about a tool, this is free money, though it does remove your flexibility for a year.
Audit seats, not just subscriptions. Per-seat tools quietly keep charging for people who left. This is the single most common form of pure waste, and it takes ten minutes to find.
This is the hardest pile because both tools have defenders.
Do not run a feature comparison. Feature lists always favour the more expensive product and rarely reflect what anyone uses. Instead, ask three questions:
Which one holds data we would hate to lose? History is stickier than features.
Which one do more people already know? Retraining is a real cost that never appears in the comparison.
Which one does the job we do most often, best? Not the most jobs. The most frequent one.
Then pick, migrate deliberately, and keep the losing tool in read-only or a downgraded tier for one billing cycle before deleting anything.
One page, kept current: tool, owner, cost, renewal date, job it does. Review it twice a year, ideally a month before your largest renewals.
Add one rule for new purchases: three sentences saying what job it does, what it replaces, and who runs it. Anything that cannot be described that way is not ready to be bought.
Both are self-reported surveys of marketing leaders, weighted towards larger organisations. Utilisation is a respondent judgement rather than a measured quantity, and the figure has fluctuated substantially year to year.
