What is SaaS license management?
SaaS license management is the practice of tracking every software subscription your company pays for, who is assigned to each seat, and whether those people actually use the tool.
Details
It replaces the legacy Software Asset Management (SAM) discipline, which was built for on-premise software licensed by installed copies. SaaS is licensed by named user or active user, so the measurement problem is different: you need per-user usage evidence, not per-machine install counts.
A working SaaS license management setup does four things: inventories every tool and seat, joins spend data to usage data, flags inactive seats, and provides an approval-gated reclaim workflow.
The four ways teams do this today: spreadsheets (works up to ~20 tools then breaks), Zylo/Productiv/Torii (enterprise SaaS management platforms starting at $30k+/yr), a homegrown script (fragile, one engineer's side project), or a mechanical tool like SeatMap.AI ($59/mo Starter).
Automate this with SeatMap.AI
The audit path above works. It also takes hours per month per tool. SeatMap.AI runs it on a schedule, stages the reclaim actions for review, and shows you the annualized savings in real dollars.