A usage audit three months before a Looker renewal saved up to $165,000
The highest-leverage move in this renewal was not a tactic at the table. It was answering one question early: who is actually using this?
I spent years on the vendor side of enterprise software, and I have also been on the buyer's side of a renewal where a simple question, who is actually using this, turned out to be worth far more than any negotiating tactic applied at the table.
The situation
The tool was a business intelligence and analytics platform, licensed per seat to a broad group of business users across several departments. Adoption had grown organically over the prior term. Seats were added whenever a new team asked for access, and nobody had gone back to confirm which of those seats were still genuinely in use as the renewal approached.
What a seat-level usage review removes
Run three months out, the gap between the top bar and the bottom bar is still fixable. Run in renewal week, it is just an argument you cannot evidence.
What the audit found
Starting roughly three months ahead of the renewal date, rather than waiting for the renewal notice, we ran a direct usage review: actual login and query activity per seat, cross-referenced against the full list of licensed users. Two things came out of it.
- A meaningful number of seats belonged to users who were inactive by any reasonable definition: no meaningful usage over an extended window, some tied to people who had changed roles or left the relevant teams entirely.
- Part of the seat allocation did not align with the licensing terms of the contract as written. Left unaddressed, that compliance gap would have become the vendor's leverage point in the renewal conversation rather than ours.
Why the timing mattered
Running this three months out, rather than during renewal week, meant there was real time to clean up the seat list properly: confirming with team leads before deactivating anyone, correcting the compliance gap before the vendor's own audit process surfaced it, and walking into the renewal with an accurate, defensible seat count rather than the inflated one the contract had drifted toward.
The outcome
By the time the renewal conversation started, the licensed seat count reflected confirmed active usage, not the accumulated total from a year of ad hoc access requests. Between the removed inactive seats and the corrected compliance position, the renewal came in up to $165,000 lower than it would have if the original seat list had simply rolled into the new term.
The takeaway
The biggest single point of leverage here was arithmetic: knowing, with confidence, who was using the tool before the vendor's renewal quote arrived. Running that check three months out also caught a compliance issue while there was still time to fix it quietly, rather than having it surface during the vendor's own review.