You're probably paying $50k to $250k a year for licences nobody uses

Most orgs aren't bleeding money on big strategic decisions. They're bleeding money on the boring stuff nobody checks. License cost optimization is one of the easiest wins in Salesforce, and most teams leave it on the table for years.

Here are three places I'd look first.

1. AppExchange Packages and Third Party Apps

This one takes manual work, but it's worth it. Pull your list of subscriptions and go through them one by one against what's actually installed and used. Mailchimp, Zapier, and similar tools are classic examples. Someone set them up two years ago for a project that ended, and the subscription just kept renewing. Nobody checks because it's not a Salesforce license in the traditional sense, it's a separate invoice that quietly survives every budget review.

2. Experience Cloud Users

Partner and customer community licenses pile up fast. Old partners, inactive accounts, test users from a project two years ago. Nobody removes them because nobody owns the list.

Sometimes the bigger surprise is the whole Experience Cloud site itself. The project that justified it ended. The partner program got cancelled. The customer portal got replaced by something else. But the license keeps renewing because cancelling it never made it onto anyone's task list.

Worth asking once a year: are we even using this anymore?

Unused Licenses

This is the simplest one. Pull a report of last login by user. Anyone inactive for 90 days or more is a candidate for downgrade or removal. Sales reps who left the company. Seasonal users. People who got a license "just in case." It adds up faster than people expect.

Why This Matters

Some of this is a quick report. Some of it, like the AppExchange and third party check, takes actual manual digging through subscriptions and contracts. Either way, none of it requires a steering committee. The savings range from $50k to $250k a year, and most of the effort is just someone finally taking the time to look.

Make it operational

As the cleanup crew, make that exercise operational by doing it once a quarter, but at least once a year.

PS: Frank Geschke: Thanks for the pointers!