Five leaks every seed startup has

After reviewing the books of dozens of seed-stage companies, a pattern emerges. The same five categories of spend show up in almost every ledger, quietly reducing runway without any single person having made a clear decision to spend there. The median total across all five, per company, is about $4,900 a month. That is between one and two extra weeks of runway, sitting in costs no one planned for.

1. Duplicate tools

The typical seed startup pays for two or three products that do the same job. Notion and Confluence. Loom and Vidyard. Figma and Framer, used by the same team. Each was added by a different person solving a problem in the moment. None were removed when the duplicate arrived. The median saving on tool consolidation alone is $740 a month, which is roughly one seat at a senior SaaS tier, every month, going nowhere.

2. Idle software seats

Seats get bought for growth that arrives slower than expected, or for contractors who finished and left. Across the stack, between 20 and 40 percent of licensed seats at most seed companies are assigned to people who have not logged in within the last 60 days. At $15 to $40 per seat per month, the idle total becomes a real number before anyone notices it.

3. Over-provisioned cloud

Infrastructure is priced at the tier selected during a load test or a funding announcement, not at the tier needed on a quiet Tuesday afternoon. A database instance sized for 10,000 concurrent users running at 300. An API plan that allows 5 million calls a month against an actual need of 190,000. Vael finds a median of $2,100 a month in over-provisioned cloud for a seed company at ten people.

4. Zombie subscriptions

A tool was trialed, or used once, or was genuinely useful six months ago. The subscription was never cancelled. The charge lands on the card each month, small enough to pass without a conversation, large enough to matter across a year. Most companies have between three and seven of these. They are not the biggest line item, but they are the most fixable in a single afternoon.

5. Untracked contractor creep

Contractors are easier to add than full-time staff, and that ease has a cost. A statement of work is agreed. The work ships. The retainer continues. A second contractor is added while the first is still billing. The total contractor line in the ledger grows quarter over quarter without anyone reviewing the whole picture at once.

# Before: seed startup at 8 people, unreviewed contractor spend
contractor line:      $14,200 / mo

# Vael identified:
  finished-project retainer:            -$3,400 / mo
  overlapping scope (2 roles, 1 job):   -$1,900 / mo

# After: reviewed and corrected
contractor spend:     $8,900 / mo
monthly saving:       $5,300
runway gained:        ~1.4 months  (at $82,300 / mo burn)

None of these leaks were decisions anyone made deliberately. They accumulated. Vael flags each one with the reason it was caught and the dollar amount, so you can review the findings in a single session and decide what to cut. The goal is not a perfect ledger. It is a clear one.