How to Run a Periodic SaaS Vendor Review
The tools you signed two years ago deserve a fresh look every twelve months.
Schedule reviews before renewals, not after
A vendor review that happens after an auto-renewal has already charged is a review that came too late. Build your review calendar around renewal dates, with a 90-day lead time for significant tools and 60 days for smaller ones. The review needs enough time to evaluate alternatives, negotiate, or arrange migration if switching is the right decision. Reviews triggered by invoice arrival are reactive; reviews triggered by calendar are operational.
The four review questions
Every periodic vendor review should answer four questions: Is adoption healthy — are the people who should be using this tool actually using it? Is the tool still solving the original problem — has the business need changed? Is the vendor relationship healthy — are support quality, reliability, and roadmap meeting expectations? And is the price still competitive — has the market moved since we last evaluated? A tool can fail on any one of these questions while passing the other three.
Document findings and commit to a decision
The output of a vendor review should be a written recommendation: renew, renew with renegotiation, renew with a watch list, or begin migration planning. Without a documented decision, reviews become discussion without action. The recommendation should include the key metrics that drove it — usage data, cost-per-active-user, support ticket history — so the next reviewer has a meaningful baseline for the following year.