Software sprawl drains millions from businesses who are choking on a river of underutilised apps contracts, but there is a way to navigate tool bloat, says Notion’s Andrew McCarthy.
How many apps did you open before lunch today? Five? Maybe ten? If you’re like the average Australian employee, you toggle between at least six distinct workplace platforms every week. For one in five of us, that number balloons to more than eleven. Each app promises to make us more productive but instead we’re left with a digital graveyard and a CFO scratching their head. This is “app sprawl”.
Andrew McCarthy, ANZ General Manager for the popular workflow tool Notion says this relentless platform switching costs us a minimum of an hour a day.“That’s almost a full day of lost productivity each week on manual tasks alone or $228 billion in efficiency for the year for the Australian economy,” he says.
What began as a drive for efficiency has quietly become one of the biggest operational blind spots in modern business.
H2: Peak SaaS Overload
Over the last decade, the makeup of a company’s tech stack has become a kind of unofficial marker for innovation. But the brag of having 20 different platforms has long lost its lustre as financial analysts finally begin to take stock of the longtail cost of signing 5-year contracts with apps that may or may not turn out to be as useful or as required as initially thought.
“I feel that we’re at peak saas overload,”says McCarthy. That surplus translates to thousands of redundant subscriptions and overlapping features eating into budgets.
Research shows software spend has increased by over 50 per cent year on year, while usage per license continues to drop. That translates to thousands of redundant subscriptions.
In a report published earlier this year by Nintex, Chief Product Officer, Niranjan Vijayaragavan remarked that software sprawl is a silent growth killer. “No amount of AI or SaaS tools can fix a broken process,” he explains. “Chasing efficiency with a sprawling tech stack is like building on shifting sands, today’s quick wins become tomorrow’s operational risks.”
Financially, this inefficiency is staggering. The average Australian organisation wastes over half its purchased software licenses, equating to tens of millions lost annually. Beyond dollars, the cognitive toll is also enormous. “It’s about wellness, too,” McCarthy stresses. “We’re not designed to shuttle data endlessly between spreadsheets. We’re built for far more meaningful work.”
The Great Unlearning
The path out of this digital thicket, McCarthy says, requires more than just better software.
“People want more than a chatbot on the side,” he says. “They want intelligence integrated into their workflow, effectively. An agent that can take the manual tasks or the grunt work away and let you focus on more creative activities”.
In practice, this means an agent that can understand the context of your work, which is precisely the problem Notion set out to solve. From the beginning, the company has aimed to unify the fractured digital workspace into one flexible, human-centred environment.
Rather than bolting on more tools, Notion’s vision is to bring everything (notes, tasks, wikis, projects) into one connected space. Co-founder Ivan Zhao completely rebuilt the product multiple times before launch, chasing an elegant simplicity that could scale with teams rather than scatter them across a dozen apps.
The impact could be huge depending on costs and size of business. IT company Brainstack claims it was using 50 + SaaS tools at once, and its software expenses had ballooned disproportionately with scaling. Having engaged third party Spendbase, they managed to cut $365,000 from their SaaS and cloud spend.
This instinct for simplicity reflects a deeper shift. “This next generation is just picking up these tools intuitively,” McCarthy explains. “They aren’t using Word and PowerPoint and Excel, they want one connected workspace they can access from their phone, their desktop, anywhere.”
He sees this shift happening from the ground up, driven by a generation that never became attached to the old, siloed ways of working. “I’ve realised that actually there’s actually this unlearning gap that is coming for the older generations, rather than a learning gap,” he says.
Choosing Software That Grows Your Business
The best solution to app sprawl is to conduct a strategic audit of your tools. “Every CFO I speak to is looking for ways to reduce their tech stack and save costs. And every end user I speak to doesn’t want more software.” A valuable platform should pass a simple litmus test based on tangible metrics, he says.
Before renewing any contract, ask your team:
- What is our daily active user rate?
Look at the analytics. Is this tool being accessed daily by 80 per cent of the team it was purchased for, or is it closer to 20 per cent? A low login frequency is a major red flag that you’re paying for “shelfware”.
- Are we using the features we pay for?
Many platforms sell you on a suite of advanced features, but teams often end up using only one or two basic functions. If you’re paying a premium for a tool that’s only being used as a glorified spreadsheet, it’s not providing value.
- How much time is it actually saving?
A powerful platform that automates administrative work provides a clear, quantifiable return. The real value here is freeing up your team for higher-impact tasks.
Ultimately, this profound shift is about more than just productivity. By automating the one to two hours per day people spend searching tooling between platforms we create space for what makes work meaningful.
As McCarthy says, “My hope is that the future is more of a human approach to work where we can focus on creativity, strategic thinking, and genuine collaboration.”
