SaaS Management in 2026: A Discipline Still Learning to See
Most of us have had the email at some point. A subscription we'd forgotten about, didn't realize would auto-renew, or hadn't touched since the day we bought it has just renewed for another twelve months. In the UK, consumer law is catching up with that experience: from January 2027, consumers get a fourteen-day cooling-off period after a subscription auto-renews onto a term of a year or more, with a proportionate refund if they cancel.
Businesses get no such protection, and our State of SaaS Management 2026 research, run in partnership with USU, suggests they could do with it. Almost half of respondents (46%) have had an inadvertent renewal, and 21% have them several times a year.
Low SaaS Management Maturity, Limited Visibility
We asked ITAM and SaaS professionals, mostly at enterprise-scale organizations in North America and Europe, to rate their SaaS management across six dimensions of maturity. Only 14% call their approach optimized, 36% are still reactive, and the average maturity score is 46 out of 100. The thread running through the results is visibility.
Lack of usage visibility is the barrier respondents name first (54%). Only 18% have a single consolidated view of SaaS spend. Teams know where the problem lies; discovery and visibility is their top improvement priority for the next twelve months, named by 61%.
None of this surprised me. SaaS management tools are forced to use so many methods to discover and inventory subscriptions because publishers don't make it easy, and the usual shadow IT and the ease of buying SaaS outside procurement add to the problem. That's how the forgotten renewal happens at work as well as at home. The difference is the scale: respondents estimate that around 38% of their SaaS licenses aren't actively used, consuming money that could be spent to improve products and services.
AI Raises the Stakes
AI, as usual, changes things. For SaaS specifically, it means companies are being moved from "all-you-can-eat" seat licenses to per-transaction consumption billing, or a mix of the two. Consumption is even harder to track than per-user subscriptions. An annual bill at least leaves time to optimize once you discover it, whereas consumption billing costs you money every moment of every business day.
Combine Your SaaS Discovery Sources
If you take one thing from the findings, I'd suggest using more than one discovery source. Start with the publisher's admin portal and your financial and expense data, then add whatever your ITSM or information security colleagues can share, such as single sign-on logs or the corporate directory. Each source has blind spots, and the others are how you find them.
The full report covers six findings in all, from cost allocation to offboarding, with practical actions and KPIs for each and a scorecard for setting your own baseline. Use those actions and KPIs to get ready for when unchecked AI expenditure makes SaaS management the priority it will need to be if organizations are to extract maximum value from their technology investments.
Get the 2026 State of SaaS Management report now.
