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 and enterprise value left on the table at exit. 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.
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 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. 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.