Case Study Preply

Preply is an online language learning marketplace that connects 30,000 tutors with over 1 million learners from 175 countries. The company has rapidly grown from a startup to an international business with offices and employees in Barcelona, Kyiv, London, and the US.

In 2024, Timothée LEON-DUFOUR joined Preply as Global IT Manager. His goal was to enhance the efficiency of SaaS operations and optimize software costs quickly.

“The company scaled, so it was time to ensure we get a better value for each dollar spent. And just on time, I was advised to check out Spendbase,” said Timothée.

Preply conducted a free SaaS spend analysis with Spendbase to identify cost-saving opportunities for their most expensive software.

“The potential savings on our two largest contracts were promising, so we gave our vendor negotiators the green light,” Timothée said.

Spendbase’s negotiation experts explained to the Preply team how the company could diversify license volume into different subscription and license tiers to yield substantial savings.

“Spendbase experts helped us save $128.5k on expensive contracts, marking a strong start to a long-term relationship,” said Timothée.

Next, Preply utilized the Spendbase SaaS management tool to ensure the purchased licenses were assigned to employees and used effectively.

“By connecting to our IDPs and using OOTB direct integrations with several apps, Spendbase showed us how often each app is used. If an employee owns a license but hasn’t logged in for a while, we can see that,” said Timothée.

With accurate data on app usage, Timothée could redistribute software licenses across the team efficiently. This visibility into app usage helps identify unused expensive licenses without surveying employees.

Optimization went beyond individual licenses. For every app tracked by Spendbase, the IT Team could see the overall usage of paid-for licenses vs free licenses. They also could see the subscription tiers the employees were using for each tool to analyze the trends in app adoption.

“Now we know when to question auto-renewals for existing subscriptions. Seeing low usage frequency gave us a reason to reassess apps and suspend them if they proved redundant. The benchmark for redundant apps is important, while also hard to maintain as many apps nowadays have overlapping features,” said Timothée.

Analyzing app usage data allowed Preply to optimize its SaaS portfolio, ensuring that unnecessary subscriptions are promptly removed and keeping the app portfolio and license volumes relevant at all times.