A typical 30-person startup uses somewhere between 40 and 80 SaaS tools. Slack for communication. Jira for project management. GitHub for code. Notion for docs. Figma for design. Salesforce for CRM. HubSpot for marketing. Zendesk for support. Datadog for monitoring. PagerDuty for alerting. AWS for infrastructure. And about 30 more that various team members signed up for with a credit card.
The problem is not the number of tools. The problem is that none of them talk to each other. Your customer data lives in five different systems. Your engineering metrics are scattered across three platforms. Nobody knows which tool is the source of truth for anything.
How tool sprawl happens
It starts innocently. An engineer needs a monitoring tool, so they sign up for Datadog. Marketing needs an email tool, so they pick Mailchimp. Sales needs a CRM, so they start using HubSpot. Each decision makes sense in isolation. Nobody is looking at the full picture.
By the time you have 30 employees, you are paying $15,000-$30,000/month in SaaS subscriptions. Some of those tools overlap. Some are barely used. Some are critical infrastructure that nobody realizes they depend on until it goes down.
The integration problem
Tools without integrations create manual work. Your support team copies customer data from Salesforce into Zendesk tickets. Your engineering team manually updates Jira tickets when PRs are merged. Your finance team exports data from four different systems into a spreadsheet to generate monthly reports.
This manual work is expensive. It is also error-prone. Data gets out of sync. Things fall through the cracks. People spend hours doing work that should be automated.
The consolidation framework
Step 1: Inventory everything. List every SaaS tool your company uses. Check expense reports, credit card statements, and SSO logs. You will find tools you did not know you were paying for. We typically find 10-15 "shadow IT" subscriptions that nobody on the leadership team approved or even knows about.
Step 2: Map the data flows. For each tool, document what data goes in, what data comes out, and who uses it. This reveals the integration gaps and the redundancies.
Step 3: Identify overlaps. You probably have two project management tools, two documentation tools, and two analytics platforms. Pick one of each and migrate. The switching cost is real but it is a one-time cost. The ongoing cost of running duplicates is forever.
Step 4: Build the integration layer. Use Zapier, Make (formerly Integromat), or native integrations to connect your core tools. The goal is to eliminate manual data transfer. When a deal closes in Salesforce, it should automatically update billing, provisioning, and support systems.
Step 5: Establish a procurement process. Going forward, every new tool purchase should answer three questions: What does it replace? How does it integrate with our existing stack? Who owns it?
The stack that works
For a 20-50 person startup, you need about 15 core tools, not 50. Here is a reference stack that covers most needs:
- Communication: Slack
- Project management: Linear or Jira
- Documentation: Notion
- Code: GitHub
- CI/CD: GitHub Actions
- Cloud: AWS or GCP (pick one)
- Monitoring: Datadog or Grafana Cloud
- Alerting: PagerDuty or OpsGenie
- CRM: HubSpot or Salesforce
- Support: Intercom or Zendesk
- Identity: Okta or Google Workspace
- Design: Figma
- Finance: QuickBooks or Xero
- HR: Gusto or Rippling
- Security: Vanta or Drata (for compliance automation)
Everything else is either a nice-to-have or should be replaced by an integration between two of your core tools.
Need help consolidating your tool stack?
traztech runs operational audits that identify tool sprawl, eliminate redundancies, and build integration layers that save your team hours every week.
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