Last year we ran a tooling consolidation for a 70-person services business. They were paying for 14 SaaS tools. They left it with 9 — and one of them (Google Workspace, which they were already paying for) was doing the heavy lifting for five things they used to pay extra for.
Worth sharing what got consolidated and what didn't.
What got replaced by Workspace + a bit of work
- Internal wiki (Notion): moved to Google Sites + Drive. Saving: $14/user/month. Real talk: Sites is uglier, but the team has stopped maintaining a wiki in two places. Net win.
- Lightweight CRM for sales pipeline (HubSpot Starter): moved to an AppSheet app on top of a Sheet. Loses some bells and whistles. Keeps the 80% the team actually used.
- Internal form tool (Typeform): Google Forms + a couple of Apps Script automations to route responses. Forms is genuinely fine for internal use.
- Document signing for low-stakes contracts (DocuSign Personal): Google Docs + a simple e-sign add-on. Kept DocuSign for the enterprise contracts that need full audit trails.
- Shared inbox tool (Front for one mailbox): Gmail collaborative inbox + delegation, with labels for triage state.
What we did NOT replace
- Slack — Workspace Chat has improved, but moving teams off Slack to chat alternatives is a culture migration, not a tooling one. Not worth it.
- The CRM proper (HubSpot Pro for marketing automation) — Workspace can't and shouldn't try to do this.
- Specialist accounting software — please don't try to do bookkeeping in Sheets.
What it cost to do the swap
Two weeks of our time, plus about ten hours from their ops lead. The AppSheet CRM took the longest, mostly in iterating with the sales team on what fields they actually used (turned out: half of what HubSpot was tracking).
What it saved
$2,100/month in cancelled subscriptions. More importantly: their ops lead has one place to look when someone says "where do I find...".
The honest caveats
This worked because the company is small enough that "good enough" beats "best in class." A 300-person sales org would not be happy with an AppSheet CRM. A team of 70 with five salespeople was delighted by it.
Workspace is more capable than most teams use it for. Worth checking your stack against it.
