Slingr Research
Every portfolio company pays a recurring, compounding tax to per-seat SaaS — and almost half of it is waste. Across a portfolio, that's EBITDA leaking every quarter — the kind of spend buyers we've seen price into the multiple. Here's how to size it for your portcos, and how to take it back.
The findings
The calculator
A transparent model built on the public benchmarks above. Adjust any input to your portco — the "recoverable share" is the portion you can take back by cutting unused licenses and replacing rented core tools with software you own.
Modeled estimate, not a quote — your portco's real numbers depend on its stack and how much of it is core. Owning core software also removes the vendor-concentration and license-cliff risk that surfaces in diligence.
What to do about it
The fastest win: reclaim the ~46% of seats nobody uses. Pure margin, no build required — and it tells you which tools actually matter.
The workflows that are the business shouldn't be rented per seat forever. Replace them with owned, AI-accelerated software — the recurring cost becomes a one-time asset.
What works at one portco ports to the platform and every add-on. The software tax is a portfolio-wide line item, so the recovery compounds portfolio-wide.
Methodology & sources
Headcount × SaaS spend per employee. Default per-employee figure: $4,830/yr (Zylo, 2025), which skews lower in manufacturing (~$2,500) and higher in tech — adjust to your portco.
The portion of spend you can take back. We default to a conservative 30%; the cited ceiling on pure waste alone is ~46% of licenses unused (Zylo, 2025), before any own-vs-rent gains.
In the model, recovered spend flows to EBITDA and is valued at your exit multiple — default 7.2×, the 2025 mid-market average (GF Data). LMM deals run ~6–8×.
Sources: 1 Zylo 2025 SaaS Management Index (40M+ licenses analyzed). 2 Zylo 2025, license utilization ~54% / ~46% unused or underutilized. 3 GF Data via Middle Market Growth, 2025; lower-middle-market entry multiples ~6–8× EBITDA. This is a transparent model built on public benchmarks, not a survey of Slingr clients — figures are illustrative and vary by company.
Questions
It's the recurring, compounding cost a portfolio company pays for per-seat SaaS — much of it for licenses that go unused — plus the lost opportunity of renting core software instead of owning it. Across a portfolio it represents real EBITDA leakage and, in our experience, enterprise value left on the table at exit.
Public benchmarks put SaaS spend at about $4,830 per employee per year, with roughly 46% of licenses unused or underutilized. For a 500-person company that's ~$2.4M a year in software, a meaningful share of it recoverable. Use the calculator to model a specific portco.
Three moves: reclaim unused licenses (pure margin), replace rented core workflows with owned AI-accelerated software, and roll the pattern across the portfolio so the recovery compounds. In the model, recovered spend flows to EBITDA and is valued at your exit multiple.
No — v1 is a transparent model built on cited public benchmarks (Zylo, GF Data), so the math is defensible and adjustable to your portco. We're collecting first-party portfolio data to publish a proprietary benchmark; contribute yours to get the full results.
Bring us one portfolio company and we'll turn the model above into a real plan — the dead licenses to cut, the core workflows worth owning, and a 30-day proof on the highest-value one.
Get a portfolio assessment →Run the numbers across the portfolio first? See the value-at-stake math.