Too many apps: how tool sprawl creeps into a small business
Nobody decides to run a ten-person business on six apps. It happens one sensible decision at a time. Here’s what it costs, why we built one app instead, and when you shouldn’t listen to us.
We think most small businesses have too many apps, and we’d know, because we used to be one. Before Klusko we ran a 12-person business, paid for a chat app and a separate task app, and still found jobs buried in messages nobody reread.
The polite name for this is tool sprawl. It helps to see how it happens, because nobody sets out to do it.
How a small business ends up with too many apps
Take a hypothetical ten-person interior design studio. It starts with a WhatsApp group, because everyone already has WhatsApp and it’s free. That works for a year.
Then a project goes wrong. A supplier order gets missed, a client is unhappy, and someone suggests Trello. The office team uses it properly. The fitters look at it twice.
The WhatsApp group gets noisy, so the studio moves the office chat to Slack. The fitters stay on WhatsApp because they’re on site and don’t want another app. Email and calendars are in Google Workspace. Holidays and the fitting rota live in a Google Sheet, because nothing else did rotas the way the office manager wanted. And one designer keeps the studio’s processes in Notion, which nobody else has opened since March.
That’s six. Nobody chose six. Each one solved the problem that was in front of someone that month, and if you asked the person who signed up for it why they did, they’d give you a perfectly good reason and probably be a bit offended you asked.
The usual fix is a new app that promises to replace four of them. It becomes the seventh.
The costs that don’t show up on the invoice
The subscriptions are the part people look at, so let’s get them out of the way. As of September 2026, Slack Pro plus Asana Starter for ten people comes to $182.40 a month on annual billing, or $222.40 monthly. Slack Pro plus Trello Standard is $122.50 a month annually. We’ve put the full sums, and how they compare with Klusko’s Team plan at £50 a month for ten people on yearly billing, in our breakdown of what Slack plus Asana costs a small team.
But we’d argue the money is the smaller cost. The bigger ones are harder to see.
Switching is the first. When the job is on a Trello card and the conversation about it is in Slack, you check both, and then you check WhatsApp as well, because the fitter replied there from the van and didn’t think to mention it anywhere else. Every job lives in three places.
Copying is the second, and it’s worse than it sounds. Someone pastes the client’s message from Slack into the Trello card so it’s “all in one place”. The client changes their mind in Slack an hour later. Now the card is wrong, and it’s wrong in a way that looks right. In our old business, the mistakes that stung came from a copy that had gone stale, not from anybody being careless.
Then there’s onboarding. A new starter at our hypothetical studio gets six logins on day one and six sets of notifications to tune, and has to learn which app is for what. “Ask in Slack, unless it’s about a job, in which case comment on the card, unless it’s urgent, in which case WhatsApp Ben.” Nobody writes that down, so the new person learns it by getting it wrong. If you’re hiring soon, our onboarding checklist has a line for exactly this: list the apps and what each is for.
And the forgotten subscriptions. The design app someone trialled on their own card and never cancelled. Seats still paid for people who left last spring. Per-seat buckets make this worse: as of September 2026, monday.com sells seats in buckets (3, 5, 10, 15, then upwards), so an 11-person team pays for 15, and Asana sells in steps of five above five seats. We find per-seat buckets annoying, and we don’t use them. You pay per person, and that’s the whole rule.
Why we built one app instead
The gap that hurt us most wasn’t between six apps. It was between two: the place where we talked about work and the place where we tracked it. Almost every job we lost went missing in that gap. Someone asked for it in chat, someone agreed in chat, and it never became a task anywhere.
So Klusko puts tasks and team chat in the same app. When you mention a task in a chat message it becomes a live link, so the conversation points at the job and the job shows who’s doing it. Your Inbox collects mentions and assignments together. There’s one login, and one search covers both. The product overview goes through the rest.
What we deliberately didn’t do is build everything. Klusko has no docs or wiki, no time tracking, no Gantt charts, no video calls and no integrations or API. Some of that may come later. Some of it probably won’t, because “all-in-one” tools that do 40 things badly are tiring to use, and we’d rather do two things properly. If you want one app that tries to cover nearly everything, ClickUp is closer to that than we are, and our Klusko vs ClickUp comparison says so plainly.
Some of you should ignore us
Does that mean every business should run on one app? No. Separate, specialist tools are the right call more often than an opinion piece from a software company would usually admit.
If your team builds software and lives in a code repository and an issue tracker, you’ll want tools that connect to each other, and Klusko has no integrations. If you run long construction programmes where one trade can’t start until another finishes, you need dependencies and a timeline, and we don’t have either. If you bill clients by the hour, you need time tracking, which we don’t do. If your IT policy requires single sign-on, we don’t support SSO. And everyone still needs email, an accounts package and something for video calls, none of which we’re trying to replace.
The honest test isn’t how many apps you have. It’s whether two of them do the same job. An accounts package plus email plus a task-and-chat app is three apps with no overlap, and that’s fine. Two chat apps and two places to list jobs is four apps doing the work of two, and that’s where time goes.
A ten-minute audit
If you want to find out how bad it is, this takes about ten minutes with a coffee:
- Write down every app the business pays for, and who pays.
- Next to each, write the one job it does.
- Circle any job that appears twice.
- Check every paid seat against your current staff list.
- Pick one home for each circled job and set a date to move.
The circled ones are the problem. For most small teams, we’d guess it’s chat and tasks. If that’s you too, Klusko is free during early access, with at least 30 days’ notice before anything is charged, and pricing has what the plans will cost when billing starts. If it isn’t you, cancel the seats for the people who left, and that’s a decent afternoon’s work anyway.
Questions
How many apps does a small business need?
Fewer than most have. For day-to-day work, a small team usually needs one place for tasks and conversation, plus email, accounting and whatever tools the trade itself requires. Problems start when two apps do the same job, such as two places to chat or two places to list work, because then nobody is sure which one is right.
What is tool sprawl?
Tool sprawl is when a business collects more software than it needs, usually one app at a time, until work is spread across several tools that overlap. The costs are partly subscriptions, but mostly time: switching between apps, copying information from one to another, setting up new starters and paying for seats nobody uses.
Is an all-in-one app always better than separate tools?
No. An all-in-one app is better when the tools it replaces overlap and the jobs are simple enough to share one place. Separate tools are better when each does something the others can’t, such as detailed timelines, time tracking or deep integrations. The test is overlap: if two apps do the same job, one of them should probably go.
Tasks and chat in one app
Free for up to 10 people, and free on every plan during early access.