Marketing automation billing audit for small teams

The moment comes when a marketing manager at a 10-person company gets the annual renewal invoice and realizes they've paid enterprise rates for a year but only used three features consistently. They have no way to show their CFO which features drove actual campaign results versus which ones sat idle — so they either renew by default or cancel and lose everything they've built.

This gap persists because the vendors selling these suites are structurally incentivised to obscure usage data. Showing you that you used 12% of your subscription would make the renewal conversation harder. So they don't build that reporting. The buyer (the CMO or founder signing the check) is often different from the user (the one-person marketing team running campaigns), and neither has a clean view of what they're actually consuming.

What's missing isn't another automation tool — it's a clear usage and cost breakdown that maps what a team actually ran (emails sent, segments built, automations triggered, reports pulled) against what they're paying for, presented in language a non-technical founder can read. Right now, a small team trying to make a renewal decision is doing this by hand: pulling exports, cross-referencing pricing tiers, guessing at what 'contacts' vs 'active contacts' means for their bill.

This is a business and not a feature because it recurs every renewal cycle, and because the vendors will never build it honestly themselves. The need is also triggered by migration: when a team decides to leave, they need exactly this audit to figure out which data and automations matter enough to recreate elsewhere. That's a second, high-urgency moment where someone will pay.

What to build

Build a read-only connector that pulls usage logs from Adobe Campaign, Alpine IQ, and similar marketing automation APIs, maps actual feature usage against the user's current pricing tier, and generates a plain-English renewal decision report showing cost-per-campaign and idle feature spend.

Where to start

Target teams that just received a renewal notice and are actively searching for justification to stay or leave — reach them through accounting and finance communities where renewal invoice shock gets discussed, not marketing forums where people are already bought in.

The hard part

Getting vendors to expose granular usage data via API is not guaranteed — Adobe Campaign in particular has inconsistent API coverage for usage metrics, so early versions may require manual log exports, which creates friction at exactly the moment you need zero friction.

How it makes money

One-time fee per audit report, priced around what an hour of a consultant's time costs — then a recurring subscription for teams that want monthly usage tracking against their tier as a budgeting tool.