Dependency Mapping

What a 15-Tool SaaS Stack Reveals About US Dependency

Take a typical European professional services firm. Twenty-five employees, two offices, founded six years ago. They chose their tools the way most companies do: whatever worked at the time, whatever the first hire already knew, whatever had a free tier that scaled with them.

Nobody sat down and decided to build the company on American infrastructure. It happened one tool at a time.

We mapped their full stack. Fifteen core tools. Here is what the dependency structure actually looks like.

How to Inventory Your SaaS Dependencies: A Practical Template for European Organisations

Ask any IT manager how many SaaS tools their organisation uses and you will get a number. It will be wrong. Usually by a factor of two or three.

The average European organisation with 20 to 50 employees uses between 40 and 120 SaaS applications. The IT department knows about perhaps half of them. The rest were adopted by individual teams, paid for on corporate credit cards, connected via OAuth, and never documented anywhere.