Software doesn't fail when it breaks. It fails when people quietly stop opening it.
A tool can run perfectly and still be dead. The real cost of unused software isn't the subscription - it's the workaround spreadsheet everyone quietly builds instead.
The subscription is the cheap part
Everyone budgets for the monthly fee. Almost nobody budgets for what happens three weeks later, when two people on the team quietly go back to the WhatsApp group and the shared spreadsheet because logging into the new system feels like one extra step. The invoice keeps arriving either way. Only now it's paying for a habit nobody kept.
Nobody was actually put in charge of it sticking
Most tools get bought top-down and handed to the whole team at once, with a login and maybe a ten-minute demo. No single person is responsible for whether it's still being used in month two. So it survives exactly as long as the most enthusiastic person on the team keeps nagging everyone else - and dies quietly the week that person gets busy.
The workaround becomes the real system
Here's the part that actually costs money: the spreadsheet or the group chat people fall back on doesn't disappear. It becomes the real system the business runs on, invisibly, while the paid tool sits there technically active. Now you're maintaining two systems for one job, paying for the one nobody trusts and getting the real data out of the one nobody planned for.
The ACS approach
When we roll out a tool, one person owns whether it's actually being used - not just whether it's installed. We check in at week two and week six with one question: is this still open, or did everyone quietly go back to the old way? If it's the second one, we fix the friction or we kill the tool fast, before a year goes by and nobody remembers why the invoice is still there.