How Much Do Companies Spend on SaaS in 2026?

In short: the median company in the European Economic Area spends €57,000 a year on software across 28 paid tools (Cledara's 2026 SaaS Spend Index). That is not a reason to cancel everything — most of it earns its keep. But it is enough money to ask a sharper question: which parts of the stack are worth owning instead of renting? This guide breaks down where the money goes, what it looks like in real prices, and how to tell the difference.

On this page

• The €57K software stack
• What this looks like in real prices
• Does spend change with company size?
• The hidden cost isn't the subscription
• Buy the commodity, build the differentiator
• What I did in my own company
• How to audit your own stack
• The bottom line

Software rarely looks expensive one subscription at a time.

€20 here. €90 per user there. A CRM. An HR platform. A support tool. An analytics product. A dashboard. An automation platform. A few AI subscriptions. Then somebody in finance adds it all up.

According to Cledara's 2026 SaaS Spend Index, the median company in the European Economic Area spends €57,000 a year on software and runs 28 paid tools. The middle 50% spend between €14,000 and €156,000 per year, and median EEA software spend is up 28% year over year.

That does not mean software is bad — most businesses could not operate without it. But it raises a useful question:

At what point should a company stop adding another SaaS product and instead build the part of the stack that is specific to how it actually operates?

That question got a lot more interesting in the age of AI-assisted software development.

The €57K software stack

The €57K median is not a vendor survey or a sum of list prices. Cledara calculates it from anonymized payments companies actually make. The typical company in the dataset runs 28 paid tools, spread across almost every function:

Category	Median annual EEA spend
AI Platforms & Model Ops	€16K
Collaboration & Productivity	€16K
Engineering & DevOps	€11K
Marketing & Growth	€9K
Data & Analytics	€5K
People Ops & Talent	€5K
Sales & Revenue	€4K
Finance & Accounting	€4K
Customer Support	€4K
IT & Security	€3K
Operations & Supply Chain	€3K
Legal, Risk & Compliance	€1K

These are category medians across different companies, so they should not simply be added together — but they show how fast a stack expands. A company doesn't decide one morning to buy 28 tools. It accumulates them: sales picks a CRM, marketing adds automation, finance buys forecasting, HR adds employee management, operations needs its own system, product adds analytics, someone wires it together in an automation tool, another team adds an AI tool.

Each purchase is reasonable in isolation. The complexity appears between them.

What this looks like in real prices

Public list prices, checked September 2026. Vendor pricing, discounts and enterprise contracts change — treat these as illustrative, not quotes.

Salesforce

Salesforce's Spanish pricing lists Sales Cloud Core at €195 per user per month. Twenty users is 20 × €195 × 12 = €46,800 a year. Advanced is €395 per user per month.

The point isn't that Salesforce is overpriced — it's a huge platform and the right answer for many businesses. The point is that one important tool can consume most of the €57K median by itself.

HubSpot

HubSpot Sales Hub Professional is roughly €90 per seat per month on an annual commitment, and Marketing Hub Professional starts around €880 per month before extra contacts. Ten Sales Pro seats plus Marketing Pro already lands near the €20K/year range before onboarding, extra contacts or other hubs. HubSpot may be worth every euro — but the bill becomes material.

HR, accounting and the long tail

Below the big platforms, the rest of the stack is where budgets quietly balloon.

HR software often starts around €5–€6 per employee per month. At 100 employees, even the entry tier is roughly €6,600–€7,200 a year before extra modules.

Accounting and ERP tools sit at the cheaper end — core plans in the tens of euros per month — and are a classic case of software that usually makes more sense to buy than rebuild. Their per-employee add-ons (payroll, inventory, POS) are what grow the bill.

Per-seat productivity tools — team chat, docs and wikis, AI assistants — look small individually but scale with headcount. Business-tier seats run roughly $15–$20 per user per month, so a 50-person team is about $9,000–$12,000 a year for each one. Three of them together already approach $30,000 a year — before any CRM, HR, ERP, support, analytics or operational software.

Does spend change with company size?

There's no universal per-employee rule. A five-person company still needs accounting, a CRM, email, analytics, support and project management — those fixed costs make per-employee spend look high. As teams grow, they gain economies of scale.

Cledara's earlier research on tech companies found average annual spend of roughly:

Company size	Avg. annual software spend
0–20 employees	$121K
50–100 employees	$194K
100–200 employees	$251K

Spend per full-time employee fell from about $8K in the smallest companies to $2.6K at 50–100 and $1.7K at 100–200. This is a multi-region tech-company dataset (US, UK, EU), so I wouldn't use it as a direct budget for a Spanish SME — but the shape matters: software spend grows with the company while spend per employee falls, and a digitally intensive business can hit a six-figure bill well before enterprise scale.

The hidden cost isn't the subscription

The invoice is only the visible part. Every extra system tends to create another login, another source of truth, another integration, another renewal, another permission model, another place customer data lives, another manual export, another spreadsheet gluing two tools that were never meant to work together.

That's where SaaS sprawl becomes an operational problem, not just a finance one. Cledara's 2025 research found companies often had roughly 40% more tools than they thought, and that companies with 100–200 employees wasted an average of about 34% of their software budget on unused seats, unused tools and overlapping functionality. That doesn't mean every company wastes 34% — it means the problem is real enough to measure.

Buy the commodity, build the differentiator

So should companies build everything themselves? No — that's the wrong conclusion. I wouldn't build my own email provider, rebuild a payments processor, write accounting software to dodge €99 a month, or clone a team-chat app for a 30-person team. Commodity software is cheap precisely because thousands of customers share the development cost.

A useful way to think about the stack is to split it in two.

Commodity software — the problem is essentially the same for every company: email, payments, accounting, video calls, authentication, basic collaboration, cloud infrastructure. Buying usually wins.

Operational software — the problem depends heavily on how your company works: your internal CRM workflow, dispatch, onboarding, quoting, approvals, field ops, stock flows, customer portals, internal dashboards, scheduling, repetitive back-office decisions, and the glue connecting five existing systems.

Historically, building that internal layer meant hiring engineers or paying an agency for months — which made a €20K–€50K SaaS contract look cheap. AI-assisted development changes the equation: a small, well-scoped internal tool can now be built and iterated far faster, especially when it's replacing one workflow rather than trying to become a general-purpose SaaS product for thousands of unrelated companies.

What I did in my own company

This is the model I ended up using at Kleta. Instead of treating every operational problem as another subscription or a multi-month dev project, I built the systems around the operation itself — CRM, customer flows, ecommerce, appointments, internal tools and automation. That cut our monthly software bill from around €30,000 to under €250, with no in-house developers.

That experience is now the basis of how I work with other companies — the AI Enablement Partner model. I don't sell a strategy deck telling you to "use more AI." I look at the operation, map the software and the manual work, calculate where the leverage is, and build the parts that make economic sense. Built, not advised.

How to audit your own stack

I don't start a software audit with "what can we cancel?" I start with "what does the business need to happen?" Then, tool by tool, I score:

1. Is it essential, or nice-to-have?
2. What does it actually cost per year, all-in?
3. What percentage of its features do you really use?
4. How much manual work exists around it because it doesn't talk to your other systems?
5. Is this workflow generic — or specific enough to your business that owning it would be an advantage?

Then the comparison that matters isn't "SaaS vs custom" in the abstract. It's:

current software cost + manual work created by the gaps + integration upkeep + cost of errors — versus — cost to build + infrastructure + maintenance.

Sometimes the answer is to keep the SaaS. Sometimes it's to downgrade it. Sometimes three subscriptions become one internal tool. And sometimes the most valuable thing to build isn't a replacement at all, but a custom layer that connects the systems you already have.

The bottom line

The typical EEA company in Cledara's 2026 dataset spends €57,000 a year across 28 paid tools, and for software-intensive businesses the bill moves into six figures fast. That's not an argument to build 28 replacements. It's that there's now enough money inside the average stack to justify a question that was much harder to make the numbers work on a few years ago:

Which parts should we stop renting and start owning?

That's where I work. I audit the stack, find the workflows where custom software has a clear operational or financial return, build the tools, and hand them to the team.

Want to know what's worth replacing?

I can review your current software stack and operating workflows, then map what to keep, what to consolidate, what to automate, what could be built, and the likely return before we start. Book a call and we'll go through it.

Diego Casabe is an AI Enablement Partner and Forward Deployed Engineer. An ex-COO and founder of Kleta, he builds custom AI tools for founders and SMBs across the US and EU, and cut his own company's software bill from €30K to under €250 a month. Built, not advised. (SaaS Spend Index data and vendor list prices checked September 2026.)