The Silent Budget Killer: Why Pay-Per-User Services Are Draining Your Startup

At Companio, we recently migrated from Google Workspace to Zoho Workplace. It wasn’t because Zoho was better — in fact, it’s a far inferior solution in terms of UX, integrations, and polish. But it is five times cheaper.

When we informed Google of our decision, they offered us a 20% discount and asked if there was anything they could do to keep us. I replied candidly: “Unless you can make your prices five times cheaper to match the competition, there’s nothing you can do. Your service is a necessary evil, not something critical for our business. And it’s HUGELY expensive for what you offer in 2025.”

Google Workspace was costing us around 1,000€/month for 56 users. That’s 1% of our monthly revenue, just for email, calendar, and online meetings. While 1% might not sound like much, for a bootstrapped startup with no outside investment, that number stings. And it grows. Month by month, user by user, as your team scales.

This article is a call to vigilance. If you’re running a bootstrapped startup — or even if you’re VC-funded but want to keep a tight ship — I’ll explain why you should track your expenses monthly, and be especially wary of pay-per-user, per-month services. These are silent killers of your runway and your profitability.

1. Why Bootstrapped Startups Must Be Extra Lean

Startups today are often sold a dream: “Move fast, break things. Use all the best tools. You need to spend money to make money.” You’ll hear that from other founders, from Twitter threads, from VCs, and (surprise) from the SaaS companies selling those tools.

It’s a seductive idea. And if you’re VC-funded with millions in the bank, maybe it makes sense to splurge on every shiny SaaS tool under the sun.

But if you’re bootstrapped, the story is very different.

We don’t have investor money cushioning our bad decisions. We can’t afford to operate inefficiently. We live off of what we earn, and that makes every euro we spend a survival decision.

At Companio, we don’t have foosball tables. Our office is wherever we open our laptop. And we continuously review our expenses. I consider this a core part of my role as CEO: to ask each month — where is our money going, and can we do better?

2. The Hidden Danger of Pay-Per-User/Month Pricing

From all the services you can subscribe to, pay-per-user/per-month services are the ones you need to watch like a hawk.

They start small. Maybe it’s 10€/user/month. You have a team of five, so it’s no big deal. But then you grow to 20 people. Then 50. Then 100. The service increases their prices. They add “premium features.” Suddenly, you’re paying thousands per month just to keep using the same tool you started with.

These pricing models scale linearly with headcount. That might sound reasonable but it’s not. Because tool usage does not scale linearly with value. A customer support rep might use the tool every hour. A marketing assistant might log in twice a month. Yet you’re paying the same for both.

What’s worse, these services often lock you into ecosystems that make switching hard and expensive. This leads to inertia, which is exactly what they want.

This happened to us with Google Workspace. A CTO we hired decided it was time to “professionalize” our setup and move from our internal Linux-based mail and calendar system to Google. It was convenient, yes. But when that CTO left, they left behind a system costing us 1,000€/mo that wasn’t easy to rip out.

And that’s just one example.

3. Practical Advice for Bootstrapped Startups

Here are some hard-earned lessons we’ve learned about avoiding these traps:

1. Hire people who know how to do things, not people who need tools to do things.

A great Linux engineer can set up a robust internal mail/calendar system. A great PM can manage a roadmap in Notion or ClickUp instead of a $30/user/month product suite. Tools don’t replace skills, they should amplify them. But only if the cost makes sense.

2. Keep a running list of all your pay-per-user/per-month services.

Track this monthly. Include:

• Service name
• Price per user
• Number of users
• Total cost

Then ask yourself:

• Are all these users actively using the service?
• Does this tool deliver tangible value to our business?
• Are there cheaper or flat-rate alternatives?

3. Don’t be afraid to switch.

Yes, migration is a hassle. But do the math.

In our case, the savings from just one month of switching to Zoho could pay for a freelancer to handle the entire migration. After that, the savings are pure profit, profit we can invest in things that actually grow the business, like hiring engineers to build features, improve automation, or develop AI systems.

Switching hurts for a few days. Staying with a bad service hurts forever.

4. What We Use Today (and How We Think About Cost)

Here’s how we approach SaaS tools today:

• We favor flat-fee pricing wherever possible.
• We prefer tools that scale with value, not with headcount.
• We periodically audit tools and usage. If a service isn’t being used regularly or delivering value, we cancel it.
• We are not afraid of less polished solutions if they do the job for 1/5 of the cost.

Is Zoho as good as Google Workspace? No. But it gives us email, calendar, and meetings, and costs us 80% less. We can live with a few UX quirks for that tradeoff.

5. Final Thoughts

Running a business is hard enough. Every euro you save on unnecessary tools is a euro you can spend building something that actually matters. Hiring. Product. Customer experience. That’s where your money should go.

Pay-per-user/per-month services are designed to grow quietly until they’re one of your biggest line items. Don’t let them.

Track them. Question them. Replace them when needed. As a founder —especially a bootstrapped one— this is your job.