Hey r/saas – as a bootstrapped founder grinding through marketing, I recently dug into some eye-opening stats on tool stacks. Turns out, 70% of us SMBs are juggling 6+ tools for everything from lead nurturing to analytics, but only about 40% feel like they're getting full bang for the buck. The rest? It's a black hole of £500+/month in subs, plus endless Zapier hacks eating another 20-30 hours/month in manual integrations. Quick breakdown from what I saw: - Basic SaaS essentials (CRM like HubSpot £50-200/mo + email automation £80-150/mo + social scheduler £40-100/mo) already hit £300-500/mo. - Scale to analytics/SEMrush (£100-300/mo) and content tools, and you're looking at £800-1,500/mo total – with 40% of that from redundant features. - Hidden killer: As your user base grows, those silos slow down funnel tweaks, dropping conversions by 15-25% because data's not flowing. The fix that stuck with me? Ruthless audits: Track "tool ROI" by hours saved vs. cost – if it's not netting 2+ hours/week per team member, axe it. Consolidating to 3-4 unified platforms can slash ops costs 35% and speed up campaign launches by 20%, per the data. SaaS peeps, what's your stack looking like right now? Biggest headache – integrations, vendor lock-in, or just the sheer number of logins? How have you clawed back budget without losing momentum? Sharing war stories below – let's source some hacks! Blog posted here for further reading: https://www.marketeze.ai/blog/the-real-cost-of-your-marketing-tool-stack-and-why-you-re-paying-too-much