More oversight was supposed to shrink this cost. It didn't.

SaaS spend is one of the largest, least-scrutinized budget lines – subscriptions renew automatically and no single owner sees the whole stack. A wave of SaaS-management and FinOps tools was built to expose this waste, but visibility never converted into savings. The problem is structural: an idle license doesn't cancel itself – someone still has to own that decision, chase the budget holder, and push it through procurement. Tools solved measurement, not governance. Reclamation needs a named owner and a fixed review cycle – not a one-time audit or a dashboard left to run itself.