Most brokerages cannot say what they spend on software in a given month. They know the big line items and lose track of the rest. Subscriptions renew quietly, seat counts drift, and tools bought for a team that has since changed shape keep billing. A yearly stack audit fixes that. This is the method we use, and it fits in an afternoon. You will need twelve months of statements, one spreadsheet, and an honest hour with your agents.
Start with an inventory, not a feeling
Before you cut anything, build the list. Pull the last twelve months of credit card statements and bank debits. Every recurring charge goes on one sheet: the tool, the job it does, the monthly cost, who owns the login, and how many people actually use it.
Usage is the part brokers skip. Check login and activity reports where the vendor offers them, and ask agents directly which tools they open. You will usually find at least one duplicate: two products doing the same job, paid twice, loved by nobody.
- Every subscription, license, and per-transaction fee, with its real monthly cost
- The owner of each one: broker, admin, or agent-reimbursed
- Actual usage: logins, transactions processed, or the agents’ own answers
- The renewal date and the notice window, so no decision slips past you
Three piles: keep, kill, renegotiate
Sort every line into one of three piles. Keep the tools that pass a simple test: people use them weekly, they touch money or compliance, and nothing else in the stack does the same job. Kill the ones that fail two of those three. Renegotiate the ones you need but pay too much for.
Renegotiation is where the money hides. Most vendors price per seat, and per-seat pricing punishes shops that grow or shrink between terms. Ask for annual pricing. Ask what happens when you add five agents mid-year. Ask to trial a lower tier before committing. Ask what it costs to export your own data, too, because that answer tells you how much the renewal conversation is really worth. The renewal date is your leverage, so have that conversation before the date, not after it.
The kill list writes itself once the inventory exists: the e-signature tool duplicating the one inside your transaction platform, the social scheduler nobody has opened since spring, the lead vendor still feeding a CRM you abandoned two migrations ago. The e-signature overlap is the most common kill of all, and our Dotloop comparison shows exactly where that duplication hides.
Do the math on the whole stack
The audit’s real output is a number: total software cost per agent per month. Here is the shape of it as a worked example. Example: a 20-agent brokerage with $6,200 a month in combined software spend is paying $310 per agent per month. If the inventory shows five overlapping tools, the overlap alone might fund a consolidation.
| Stack line | Example monthly cost | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Transaction platform, 20 seats | $450 | Renegotiate seats |
| E-signature add-on | $120 | Kill, duplicated |
| CRM | $900 | Keep |
| Social scheduler | $180 | Kill, unused |
| Website and IDX | $1,100 | Renegotiate at renewal |
Every figure in that table is arithmetic on the stated example, not a quote from any vendor.
Run your own numbers with our brokerage software cost calculator, then compare the total against what a single platform charges for the same jobs. For reference, BrokerDIY’s ratified pricing is a 14-day free trial, then Starter $29/mo, Pro 5x $99/mo, Pro 20x $199/mo, Team $349/mo, $0 setup fee. That is the number to beat, or to beat deliberately.
If you want the longer version of this method, negotiation scripts included, it lives with our other walkthroughs in the guides section. The same keep-kill-renegotiate lens runs through our brokerage tech-stack guides, and the Compass tech stack and Keller Williams tech stack write-ups are two good places to see it applied.
Questions brokers ask
How often should we audit the stack?
Once a year, timed a month or two before your largest renewal, plus a quick pass whenever headcount shifts by more than a few agents. The audit is cheap. Drift is what costs money.
Should agents pay for their own tools?
That is a policy choice, not a software choice. If agents pay, put in writing who owns the account and the data inside it. Mixed ownership is exactly where audits and agent exits get messy.
What if we are locked into a contract?
Calendar the notice window the day you sign. Mark the renewal date, set a reminder sixty days ahead, and decide then with the inventory in front of you. Locks expire. The expensive mistake is letting one renew by default.