Why We Built CostOrbit
The renewal that caught us off guard
One Monday morning our finance lead forwarded me an email with a subject line I still remember: "Did we mean to renew this?" We had just been auto-billed for an analytics tool nobody on the team had opened in months.
Nobody was at fault. There simply was no process to catch it. We didn't have anyone whose job it was to watch a dozen different renewal dates scattered across a dozen different vendor dashboards.
That morning sent me down a rabbit hole. I started asking other team members the same question: "How do you track your subscriptions?" The answer, every time, was some version of "a spreadsheet that's out of date" or, more honestly, "we don't."
Small teams don't have a procurement department
The tools built to solve this problem weren't built for us. Platforms designed for companies with hundreds of employees cost tens of thousands of dollars a year and come with sales calls, onboarding calls, and workflows built for procurement teams we don't have. On the other end, consumer apps built for tracking a streaming subscription have no concept of a team, an approval, or a vendor contract.
Businesses with five to a hundred employees are stuck in the middle. Studies on SaaS sprawl put the average mid-size company at 40 or more active subscriptions, and estimate billions of dollars wasted every year on licenses nobody remembers to cancel. We're big enough to have real software spend, often tens of thousands of dollars a year spread across dozens of tools, but small enough that nobody has the bandwidth to manage it as a full time job. That gap is where CostOrbit lives.
What we set out to build
CostOrbit is the tool I wished I had that Monday morning. Add a subscription in under a minute. Get a reminder before it renews, not after. See total spend across the whole team in one dashboard instead of piecing it together from a stack of credit card statements. Give a teammate visibility without handing over your password.
None of this is complicated technology. It's just attention paid to a problem that's easy to ignore until it costs you money.
Built for businesses like ours
If you're running a small or medium business, here's what CostOrbit gives you that we couldn't find anywhere else at a price that made sense:
- Renewal reminders that actually arrive before the charge, not a confused email from finance after the fact
- One shared dashboard your whole team can see, so tracking spend isn't one person's private spreadsheet
- Setup in minutes, no procurement call, no IT integration required
- Clear visibility into where your money is going, so cutting an unused tool is a five minute decision instead of a mystery
From here
We're just getting started. CostOrbit is small, built by a small team that has felt this exact pain, and every feature we ship starts with a real renewal that caught someone off guard. If that sounds familiar, we built this for you.
Thanks for reading, Robert Moore Co-founder, CostOrbit