Answer
What is shadow SaaS?
Short answer
Shadow SaaS is any software an employee signs up for using company credentials or a company credit card without approval from IT, security, or procurement.
Details
The typical mid-market company has 3–5x more SaaS apps in use than IT knows about. Common culprits: Loom, Notion, Airtable, Figma trials, marketing automation tools, and single-user AI tools.
Shadow SaaS creates two risks: uncontrolled data exposure (customer data in an unvetted vendor) and duplicate spend (three teams paying for the same tool independently).
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.