I looked at SaaS pricing data and realized something weird about how founders buy tools

Something interesting happened while I was collecting data for TrustROI.

I started looking at pricing and typical usage patterns across popular SaaS tools.

And a pattern started to appear.

A lot of founders and small teams are paying for tools they barely use.

Here are some rough numbers I noticed while researching SaaS pricing and usage patterns:

The average startup uses 8–15 SaaS tools.

If the average tool costs around $30–$100/month, that means many startups are spending $300–$1200/month on software.

But here’s the surprising part.

Many tools are only used for one or two features.

Which means a lot of teams are paying full subscription prices for a small fraction of the value.

In some cases, a single feature justifies the whole cost.
In others, it definitely doesn’t.

This made me wonder if SaaS discovery is solving the wrong problem.

Right now most platforms help you find more tools.

But maybe what founders actually need is a way to understand:

Is this tool worth the price for my use case?

That’s one of the ideas behind TrustROI, where I'm trying to make SaaS value more transparent.

Curious how others think about this.

How many SaaS tools is your company currently paying for?

And how many of them would you say are actually worth the cost? 🤔