It's Tuesday morning at Acme Outdoor Gear¹, and the support lead has a customer on the phone asking about a bulk order. The deal lives in the sales team's pipeline tool. Support can't see it. So she messages the sales manager, waits eleven minutes, and the customer waits with her.
By Friday, someone has a bright idea: "Let's just give support a seat in the sales tool." Sorted. Then sales asks for seats in the support desk so they can check whether a big account has open complaints before they ring. Then the warehouse wants to see project timelines. Each request is reasonable. Each one adds a line to the software bill.
Call it the peek tax: paying a full monthly seat so someone can look at a slice of another team's work for a few minutes a week. You're probably paying it right now, and it's rarely on anyone's radar because it arrives one seat at a time.
Why the peek tax keeps growing
Every team picks the tool that suits its own job, which is sensible. Sales likes its pipeline. Support likes its ticket queue. Operations likes its project board. The trouble starts where the work overlaps, and in a business of any size, it overlaps constantly.
Customers are the overlap. Orders are the overlap. A complaint, a deal and a delivery date are often the same story told in three tools. When each tool charges per seat, every person who needs to see the whole story costs you a seat in each place it's told.
This is happening at scale. Zylo's 2026 SaaS Management Index found the average organisation runs 305 SaaS applications and leaves 36% of its licences unused against recommended utilisation (Zylo, 2026, https://zylo.com/news/2026-saas-management-index). The same report found business units, rather than IT, now control 81% of SaaS spend (Zylo, 2026, https://zylo.com/2026-saas-management-index), which is exactly how peek seats slip through: each team buys a few, and nobody adds them up.
What it costs a 20-person business
Here's Acme Outdoor Gear, with 5 people in sales, 4 in support and 11 across operations and the warehouse. Prices are each vendor's published per-seat rate in US dollars, billed annually and checked in October 2026, converted at a working rate of NZ$1.70 to the US dollar with 15% GST added and rounded to the nearest NZ$5.
| Tool | Who really works in it | Who has a seat just to peek | Listed price per seat per month | About NZ$, incl. GST | Monthly peek cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pipedrive Growth (sales pipeline) | 5 sales | 4 support | US$39 (https://www.pipedrive.com/en/pricing) | NZ$75 | NZ$300 |
| Zendesk Suite Team (support desk) | 4 support | 5 sales | US$55 (https://www.zendesk.com/pricing/) | NZ$110 | NZ$550 |
| Asana Starter (projects) | 11 ops | 9 sales and support | US$10.99 (https://asana.com/pricing) | NZ$20 | NZ$180 |
| Total | 18 peek seats | NZ$1,030 |
That's about NZ$12,360 a year, including GST, spent so people can look things up. That's before the seat minimums some vendors apply, and before anyone upgrades a tier to get one extra feature. None of these tools is overpriced for the people who live in them. The waste is the 18 seats bought for glancing.
Run a peek-seat audit this week
Your billing pages, your user lists and about an hour will do it. If you've already added up your whole software bill, you have the user lists; this goes one level deeper, seat by seat.
Step 1: List every per-seat tool. Pull the admin user list for each one. Your card statement will remind you of the ones you've forgotten.
Step 2: Sort every seat into one of three groups.
- Lives in it: uses it most days to do their main job.
- Peeks: logs in to look something up, rarely creates or changes anything.
- Ghost: hasn't logged in for 60 days.
Most tools show last login and activity on the admin page. If yours doesn't, ask people directly. Use this script in your team chat:
"Quick software tidy-up. For each tool below, tell me: do you use it to do your job, or just to check things from time to time? No wrong answers, we're trying to stop paying for seats nobody needs."
Step 3: Price the peekers and ghosts. Multiply each group by the seat price. Ghosts are free money: remove them today. Peekers need a plan, because they genuinely need the information.
Step 4: Ask each vendor about cheaper access. Some tools sell read-only or "light" seats. Zendesk, for example, has light agents who can read tickets and add private comments. They're an extra add-on on Suite Team and included on the higher Suite plans (Zendesk, 2026, https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/6510562911770). Asana lists view-only licences on its Enterprise plan (https://asana.com/pricing). Check whether the cheaper seat actually costs less once you factor in the plan it requires.
Step 5: Decide, per peeker, how they'll get the information. Options below.
The audit checklist
- Every per-seat tool listed, with its monthly seat price
- User list exported from each tool
- Every seat marked "lives in it", "peeks" or "ghost"
- Ghost seats removed
- Peek seats totalled in NZ dollars per year, including GST
- Vendors asked about read-only or light seats
- A plan for each peeker (report, shared view or one shared system)
- Calendar reminder to rerun the audit in six months
Four ways to feed the peekers
Once you know who's peeking and why, you have choices. From cheapest to most thorough:
- A weekly export. Sales sends support a short list of open deals every Monday. Cheap, but stale by Wednesday.
- A shared dashboard. Many tools let you share a report with people who don't hold a seat. Good for numbers, less good for "what did this customer actually say?"
- An integration. Connect the tools so key details copy across. It works until a field changes and nobody notices the copy is wrong.
- One shared place for the data. Put the customer, the deal, the tickets and the jobs in one system, so each person needs one seat in one place, rather than a seat in every tool that holds part of the story.
Most businesses use a mix. The audit tells you where each one is worth it.
"But we need the best tool for each team"
Fair. A support team handling hundreds of tickets a day may well need a specialist desk, and a big sales team may need the forecasting a dedicated pipeline tool offers. Keep those seats for the people who live in the tool.
The question is narrower: does the support lead need a full sales seat to see one deal, or does she need to see the deal? Those are two different purchases. When most of your seats are peek seats, you're paying specialist prices for a lookup.
Another fair objection: "It's only about NZ$75." True, one seat is small. The table above is what happens when you stop looking at one seat and add up 18.
A worked example: Acme Outdoor Gear, three months later
Acme ran the audit on a Thursday afternoon. They found 3 ghost seats and 18 peek seats. The ghosts went straight away. For sales, a shared weekly support report replaced the Zendesk seats. For support, the bigger question remained: they needed live deal details on calls, and an export wouldn't do.
So Acme looked at where its data lived. Sales, support and operations were all working on the same customers and orders, just in different places. They moved their customer records, orders and support requests into one shared system, where every role could open the same customer and see what it needed.
The sum changed shape. Before, the 20 staff held 38 seats across three tools: 9 in Pipedrive, 9 in Zendesk and 20 in Asana, about NZ$2,070 a month. In one shared system where each person needs one seat at NZ$50 a month, the bill is 20 × NZ$50 = NZ$1,000 a month, or NZ$12,000 a year. That's roughly what the three tools would cost with every peek seat removed (NZ$1,035 a month), so the saving is the peek tax itself, and support gets live deal details on calls instead of a weekly report. That's how Thogits prices it: each team's apps share the same records, and one NZ$50 seat per person, incl. GST, covers every app, so a new warehouse lead gets one seat rather than three. The support lead can answer a bulk-order question while the customer's still on the line.
Your next hour
Open your software bill, export one user list and mark every seat. Start with the most expensive tool. If more than a quarter of the seats are peekers, you've found money, and probably a few frustrated people who've been waiting on messages to do their jobs.
¹ Acme Outdoor Gear, its team and its seat counts are illustrative. Vendor prices and Zylo's figures are as published. NZ$ prices include GST, and the NZ$1.70 exchange rate is a working assumption.