What does software really cost a 20-person consulting practice?

A prospective client recently asked us a practical question: we are hiring, our software bill rises every time we add a consultant, and we do not know which costs are actually necessary. Where should we start?

That question is more useful than “which tool should we replace?” It starts with the business model of the software spend. In many consulting practices, the 5 workflow categories below are priced per seat. As the team grows, the cost grows automatically - even when the underlying work has not materially changed.

To make the conversation concrete, we modelled a 20-consultant advisory practice. This is an illustrative benchmark, not a client result or a quote. The point of an audit is to replace these figures with the practice’s own invoices, contracts and usage data.

The 5 software lines that tend to grow with headcount

Workflow	Typical commercial setup	Illustrative annual cost	Managed open-source route	Illustrative annual run cost
Practice CRM and pipeline	Mid-tier plan for 20 seats, such as HubSpot or Salesforce	$14,400	Twenty CRM with unlimited seats and contacts	$1,200
Proposal and SOW e-signing	8 sender seats, such as PandaDoc or DocuSign	$4,700	OpenSign with unlimited envelopes	$600
Client calendar booking	Teams plan for 20 seats, such as Calendly	$3,840	Cal.com on the practice’s own domain	$500
Client diagnostic surveys	Mid-tier plan, such as Typeform or Qualtrics	$4,200	Formbricks with unlimited responses	$500
Confidential document storage	Business plan for 15 seats, such as Box or ShareFile	$4,700	Nextcloud on the practice’s own cloud	$1,200
Total		$31,840		$4,000

The arithmetic in this model is simple: $31,840 in representative commercial licensing minus $4,000 in illustrative managed running costs produces a potential annual difference of $27,840.

That is not a recommendation to migrate all 5 systems. It is a prompt to ask a better question: which of these lines are paying for a workflow your practice genuinely needs, and which are paying a per-seat meter by default?

Start with the work, not the replacement

The fastest savings are often not migrations at all. They are the licenses already paid for but no longer justified:

• Seats that have not been used for months.
• Higher tiers bought for a feature no one uses.
• Duplicate tools adopted by separate teams for the same job.
• Auto-renewals that outlived the client engagement or internal process that created them.

For a prospective client, this is where we would begin: invoices, renewal dates, seat counts and administrator usage exports. No consultant interviews are required for the first pass. Those documents let us identify the cost, the owner, the renewal deadline and the evidence of actual use before anyone debates products.

Only after that should a practice consider whether a workflow is a good candidate for a managed open-source alternative. CRM, scheduling, surveys, document storage and e-signing each carry different operational and security requirements. A lower license price is not automatically a lower total cost if it introduces reliability, implementation or support risk.

When a managed open-source route is worth evaluating

Open-source software can be a useful route when a practice needs control of its data, does not want headcount to dictate the bill, and has a clear operating owner. It is not a shortcut to “free software.”

The managed cost in the model above includes the reality that software still has to run: hosting, backups, updates, monitoring, access control and support. That is why we compare managed running cost with commercial licensing rather than treating an open-source download as zero cost.

A consulting practice should be especially careful with 3 questions:

1. Client confidentiality: Where will documents, survey responses and CRM data reside? Who administers access, backups and retention?
2. Workflow fit: Does the alternative cover the small number of capabilities people actually rely on, such as a client-facing booking page, an approval trail, a template library or integrations?
3. Change cost: What would migration, testing and training take - and is the renewal date far enough away to make a deliberate decision?

If the answer to those questions is unclear, keep the commercial product while removing waste. If the workflow is stable and the per-seat bill is the main problem, a managed alternative may be worth pricing properly.

A practical 3-week audit for a consulting practice

For the prospective client who asked the original question, the useful deliverable is not a long tool list. It is a decision record for each meaningful software line:

• Keep when the tool is used, differentiated and appropriately priced.
• Reduce when a lower tier or fewer paid seats meet the demonstrated need.
• Consolidate when 2 tools solve the same workflow.
• Renegotiate when usage supports a different commercial arrangement.
• Replace only where a managed alternative has a credible operating plan.
• Cancel when there is no evidence that the service still supports current work.

FoundMargin’s software audit is a fixed-fee, 3-week engagement based on invoices and admin usage exports. The benchmark used here describes the type of work we assess. It does not promise that every consulting practice will achieve the same result. Any savings figure must be supported by that practice’s contracts, usage and operating requirements.

The question to bring to your next renewal

Before approving another per-seat renewal, ask: What specific work does this license enable, who uses it, and what would it cost to run that work another way?

That question changes a software review from a procurement exercise into a margin decision. For a 20-person consulting practice, even one well-evidenced reduction can matter. The goal is not to make the stack smaller for its own sake. It is to make every recurring software cost earn its place.