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

SaaS spend has become one of the largest and least-scrutinized line items in a modern operating budget – subscriptions renew automatically, seats get added faster than they're revoked, and no single owner sees the whole stack. The past few years saw a wave of SaaS-management and FinOps tooling built specifically to expose this waste. That visibility never converted into savings at scale. The reason is structural, not informational: seeing that a license is idle doesn't cancel it – someone still has to own that decision on a recurring schedule, chase the budget holder, and push it through procurement. The tools solved the measurement problem. They didn't solve the governance problem underneath it. The practical conclusion for most companies: license reclamation needs to run as an operating process with a named owner and a fixed review cycle – not a one-time audit or a dashboard left to run itself.