TMW #183 | The SaaSflation Disease

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The SaaSflation Disease

SaaSflation is infecting the CMO and killing the CFO – and AI will only make it worse

Do you feel like you’re drowning in SaaS subscriptions? Does your team constantly suggest new platforms? Does the word “budgets” make you break out in a cold sweat? Do you feel like more of your time is spent on managing Martech rather than using it? If you answered yes to any of those questions, you might very well be suffering from SaaSflation: A disease that is infecting businesses big and small, especially in the marketing department.

For many readers, those symptoms will be all too familiar. The number of SaaS subscriptions that businesses have – particularly in the marketing function – has ballooned in recent years. Add to that the fact that 73% of SaaS vendors upped their pricing in 2023, and you have a painful problem.

Matt Stoller, who covers the world of monopolies and antitrust regulation with the BIG newsletter, has a term that can be applied to SaaSflation: Economic termites. It refers to the plague of suppliers that eat away at a business’s profits by slowly but steadily raising their prices. One supplier raising prices isn’t a big problem, but lots of suppliers doing so is.

The marketing department is particularly susceptible to economic termites because of the multitude of SaaS subscriptions it pays for. Everywhere a marketer looks, there is a new Martech platform. Or an integration fee. There are contract renewals all year round. Budget sheets are now near-impenetrable sinkholes of Mensa-level formulas. There’s so little time to do any actual marketing anymore. How did we get to this point?

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Stay Curious,

Keanu Taylor

Make sense of marketing technology.

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Want to share something interesting or be featured in The Martech Weekly? Drop me a line at juan@themartechweekly.com.