Paid for in January

Fourteen logins since January.

That is the kind of line that stops a stack review, sitting next to a tool that costs real money and works exactly as it was sold.

The shape is familiar. The annual contract gets signed in January, when the budget is new and the year looks long: the email platform with the better segmentation, the analytics layer, the attribution product, the listening tool somebody demonstrated well. Twelve months, paid up front, with the discount for paying up front.

By June a few of them have gone quiet. Not broken. Quiet.

And they stay, because the money has already left. Cancelling saves nothing this year, so nothing gets cancelled, and the review moves on to the lines where a saving is actually available.

What that reasoning misses is that the fee is the smaller half of the cost.

The other half is an hour a week. Somebody exports the file every Sunday so the dashboard has something in it. Somebody reconnects the feed when it drops. Somebody keeps the naming convention tidy so a report nobody opens does not break. Somebody answers the renewal email when it arrives. That hour lands on whoever has the least protected time, usually the most junior person on the team, and across the rest of the year it adds up to more than a full working week of their life.

A working week is a real decision. It is a landing page not tested, a market not learned, a competitor's pricing not read properly.

The invoice is a sunk thing and there is nothing left to decide about it. The hour is not sunk. It is being spent again this week, and it is the only part of that contract still open to a decision.