Find the Seats You're Paying For — But Nobody's Using
Audit per-seat SaaS, see cost-per-active-seat, and let LemSubs flag any tool where less than half your paid seats are actually in use.
What goes wrong today
| Problem | Detail |
|---|---|
| Phantom Seats | Buying 25 seats but only 9 people actually use the tool |
| Leaver Licences | Departed employees still billing on annual seats |
| No Unit Economics | Total cost is visible — cost per active user is invisible |
| Quarterly Audits That Never Happen | Seat audits are everyone's job and nobody's job |
| Renewal Surprises | Annual renewal hits before utilisation is reviewed |
| Overlapping Tools | Two SaaS doing the same job, both with full seat counts |
| Departmental Blind Spots | Marketing, eng and ops each buy the same tool because nobody owns the seat audit |
| Forgotten Lifetime / LTD Licences | One-time deals stay in the stack with zero usage, no renewal pressure to clean them up |
How LemSubs handles it
- Seat Tracker Kind: Per-subscription paid vs active seat fields
- Cost-Per-Active-Seat: Auto-calculated unit metric reveals true SaaS economics
- Zombie Seats Insight: Smart rule flags any tool with < 50% utilization
- Bundle & Overlap Audits: Combined with overlap detection to right-size the whole stack
- Quarterly Recount Reminders: LemSubs prompts an audit every quarter so utilisation never goes stale
- Workspace Cost Ownership: Assign tools to departments so seat audits become someone's job
Frequently asked questions
Do I need the Teams plan to track seats?
No — seat data is available on Pro. Teams adds shared workspaces if multiple admins manage the audit.
How does the Zombie Seats rule decide?
Any per-seat subscription with under 50% active-seat utilisation is flagged with the seats you should drop.
How often should I update active counts?
Quarterly works for most teams. LemSubs prompts you when a seat figure goes stale.
Can finance get the data without logging in?
Yes — CSV export delivers a clean per-tool seat & cost report finance can drop straight into a board pack.