Benchmark

Cost Structure Teardown

Most cost bases weren't designed. They accumulated. The teardown redesigns them.

Why This Audit

An intentionally designed cost structure is a competitive advantage

In lower mid-market SaaS, the cost base typically evolves without design. Services-like scaling creeps into what should be a software margin profile; vendor sprawl accumulates quarter by quarter; SaaS tool overlap goes unaudited; support costs scale linearly with customer count; and infrastructure bills balloon without FinOps governance. Nobody made these decisions — they just happened.

The BVC Cost Structure Teardown performs a zero-based review across nine cost-base axes, from services creep and vendor sprawl to procurement discipline, cloud FinOps, and functional cost ownership. Disciplined procurement alone typically delivers 8–15% savings on addressable spend, and SaaS rationalization programs recover 15–25% of software spend — without disrupting a single customer.

What We Find

Where the margin is hiding

SaaS Tool Sprawl

15–25% spend recovery

A quarterly SaaS audit is a zero-cost mechanism to recapture material spend.

Cloud / Infrastructure

20–35% FinOps recovery

FinOps governance is the highest-ROI engineering investment above $500K cloud spend.

Vendor Rationalization

Contract sprawl

Unmanaged vendor growth silently compresses gross margin quarter over quarter.

Procurement Discipline

8–15% savings

Disciplined procurement delivers savings without vendor disruption.

Support Cost Scaling

Linear with customers

Support cost-per-customer is a leading indicator of product-quality debt.

Cost Ownership Clarity

Functional RACI gaps

Cost-ownership clarity is the prerequisite for every reduction program.

Deliverable

What you walk away with

Cost Map

Full P&L decomposition by function, vendor category, and cost driver — with benchmarks against SaaS peers.

Savings Inventory

Ranked list of recoverable dollars by line item, with confidence interval and implementation effort.

Procurement Playbook

Governance model for vendor management, approval thresholds, and quarterly rationalization cycles.

From audit to action

The Cost Structure Teardown produces the prioritized fix list. The Rebuild layer deploys the operating system that fixes it — with BVC inside the business, not alongside it.

Scope an Audit See the Framework