Do two competing LLMs necessarily duplicate one another? Spendesk has taken this stance to discuss enterprise software spending in the EU.
Beyond the methodology, it should be borne in mind that the results come from a provider of spend-management solutions. We will nevertheless highlight a few findings, particularly because they illustrate a simple truth: for the same thing, not everyone pays the same price.
7 Billion euros to be found by negotiating?…
The analysis covers the period from June 2025 to June 2026. It encompasses 2,568 active companies. The majority are in France (60.5%). The rest are spread across 13 other countries, led by Germany (16%) and the United Kingdom (12.6%). The distribution mirrors the European market: 91% of these companies have fewer than 250 employees.
From this sample, Spendesk extrapolates to the EU using Eurostat data for 2024. The takeaway: in the 50–250 employee category, price variation alone drives €7 billion in overspending per year.
This figure stems from analyzing spending across about thirty seat-licensed SaaS software products. Spendesk says it measured what companies paid monthly per employee “for exactly the same product.” It used the “most disciplined quartile” as the reference (i.e., the 25% of companies with the lowest spending) and then compared the entire sample.
Between the “top performers” and the median expenditure, the ratios are 3.4:1 for Figma, 3.7:1 for Slack, and 4.4:1 for HubSpot. They rise to 8.3:1 for Atlassian and 9:1 for Notion.
Spendesk concedes that the breadth of a vendor’s offering can, for players like Adobe and Atlassian, partly explain the gap. It argues that this cannot be said about Slack: in its view, the difference is “almost entirely” a matter of opacity… or of a lack of negotiation.
… and €3 billion by deduplicating software?
Spendesk estimates that deduplicating software within the sample would save €15 million per year. Extrapolated to EU companies with 50–250 employees, that amounts to €3 billion.
The AI and design segments, it explains, concentrate more than two-thirds of the potential savings. In these segments, respectively 72% and 64% of buyers pay for at least two competing products*.
Spendesk indeed characterizes this situation as duplication. It notes, in this regard, that 65% of the companies it analyzed use at least two competing models, up from 29% a year earlier.
Over the period studied, the median monthly variation in the AI-related invoice amount stands at 61%. It is somewhat higher in France (62.4%) than in the United Kingdom (60.2%) and Germany (55.5%). It should be noted that Spendesk includes usage-based pricing in its calculations…
* Followed by development tools (44%), automation (37%), project management (29%), CRM (22%), etc.
