Getting one growth move live should not take this much chasing.
A team wants to test a new offer. The brief is in Notion. The page is in Webflow or Shopify. The ads are in Meta and Google. The email flow is in Klaviyo. The spend is in the ad accounts. Orders live in Shopify. Payments live in Stripe. Results are checked in GA4, Triple Whale, spreadsheets, and Slack.
Every tool is useful. The work still slows down because the work crosses all of them.
Okta's Businesses at Work 2024 found that the average organization runs 93 SaaS apps. Large companies run 231 on average, and the largest 10% run more than 400. In 2016, the average was 16. The tool count keeps going up. The problem is no longer whether the company can buy good software. The problem is whether the company can make the tools add up to one clear answer.
The real cost is not the subscription
The invoice is only the visible cost. The hidden cost is the time spent making tools agree.
In growth work, that cost shows up in five ways.
The launch tax. A test does not go live when the idea is ready. It goes live when the page, ad, email, tracking, approvals, and reporting have all been wired together. A four-hour business decision becomes a two-week coordination job.
The data tax. The same customer, campaign, order, or creative has different IDs in different systems. Shopify, Stripe, Meta, GA4, Klaviyo, and the CRM all describe the same business with different records. The team spends time matching instead of learning.
The decision tax. The result of a test is discussed in Slack, summarized in a doc, pasted into a deck, and forgotten before the next test. The next team repeats the same idea because the previous learning never became usable memory.
The trust tax. Marketing sees one number. Finance sees another. The agency has a third. If nobody trusts the number, the team cannot scale spend with confidence.
The vendor tax. Tools change APIs, change pricing, get acquired, sunset products, or break integrations. Google Optimize was sunset on September 30, 2023. Companies that depended on it had to migrate quickly, often spending tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. The risk is not one vendor. It is the number of important workflows attached to vendors the company does not control.
Why consolidation has not fixed it
The obvious answer is to buy a bigger suite. That has been tried for twenty years.
Salesforce bought ExactTarget, Demandware, MuleSoft, Tableau, and Slack. Microsoft bundles Dynamics, Teams, GitHub, Power Platform, and Copilot. Shopify has expanded from checkout into fulfillment, payments, analytics, email, and audiences.
These suites solve some problems. They do not remove the operating work. A suite usually has several product models under one logo. A best-of-breed stack has several vendors. Either way, the growth team still has to connect the offer, page, ad, email, spend, order, and decision.
The old trade was:
- Best-of-breed gives better point tools but more integration work.
- Suites reduce vendor count but rarely fit the whole workflow.
Growth teams end up paying both costs.
Why growth feels the pain first
Tool sprawl hurts every function. Growth feels it earlier because the work is frequent, cross-functional, and tied directly to money.
A finance close may happen monthly. A security audit may happen quarterly. A growth team can run offer, landing page, creative, audience, email, and budget changes every week. Each move touches different systems, different owners, and different definitions of success. The more often the loop runs, the more expensive the handoffs become.
That is why the problem is not only "too many tools." A large company can survive many tools when the work is slow and the boundaries are clear. Growth work is different. The same move can involve:
- a positioning decision from the founder or growth lead
- a page change in Shopify, Webflow, or a CMS
- a creative angle in Meta, Google, TikTok, or an affiliate channel
- a lifecycle flow in Klaviyo, Customer.io, Omnisend, or Braze
- tracking in GA4, server-side tags, pixels, and event tools
- revenue in Shopify, Stripe, Recharge, PayPal, or the bank
- a final decision in Slack, Sheets, Notion, Asana, or an agency report
No single point tool owns that loop. Each tool owns one slice. The business decision crosses all of them.
This creates a specific kind of operating drag. The team does not only wait for work to be done. It waits for work to become comparable. Was the offer live before spend moved? Did the right audience see the right creative? Did the email variant match the landing page variant? Did the test window include the refund window? Did finance look at net revenue or gross revenue? These questions are not edge cases. They decide whether a team scales or stops.
The new standard
The next operating standard for growth is not a bigger dashboard. It is a cleaner work record.
A launch should carry the business context from the beginning:
- the hypothesis
- the offer
- the page or funnel
- the creative and message
- the audience and channel
- the budget or spend rule
- the tracking plan
- the approval
- the revenue and margin readout
- the decision
- the learning to reuse
The point is not to remove every specialist tool. Shopify should still process orders. Stripe should still process payments. Meta and Google should still buy media. Klaviyo should still send lifecycle messages. The point is that the growth move should not be rebuilt by hand across those tools every time.
When the work record is clear, the team can move faster without lowering the bar. The page can launch faster. The numbers can be checked sooner. The decision can be made with fewer meetings. The next test starts from what the last one proved, not from what someone remembers.
What operators actually need
The team does not need another dashboard that reports on the mess after the fact.
They need one place where a growth move can be planned, built, launched, measured, learned from, and automated:
- What are we testing?
- Which offer, page, creative, audience, and channel are involved?
- What needs to be built: page, email, ad, offer, journey, doc, dashboard, or workflow?
- Which launch path is involved: Shopify, Meta, Instagram, Google Ads, SEO, Klaviyo, Brevo, Customer.io, Omnisend, Apollo, HeyReach, Instantly, Buffer, TikTok, Everflow, Slack, Notion, webhook, or API?
- What changed in each tool?
- Did the tracking fire?
- What happened to spend, orders, refunds, payouts, COGS, margin, customer behavior, experiment exposure, CAC, ROAS, MER, and payback?
- What decision was made, and why?
- What reusable lesson or playbook should the next move start from?
- What can an agent safely automate next with the right context, permissions, approvals, retries, and logs?
That is the job. The category name matters less than the workflow.
What Lyberty does
Lyberty connects the revenue execution chain around the work itself.
An initiative, offer, page, ad, email, journey, experiment, audience, order, spend line, refund, payout, approval, decision, lesson, and workflow are tied to the same work history. The team can see what was planned, what was built, what launched, what happened, which numbers are reliable, who approved the move, what was learned, and what can be automated next.
Lyberty does not replace every tool. Shopify can still be the commerce system. Stripe can still be payments. Meta and Google can still be ad platforms. Klaviyo can still send email. The point is to stop rebuilding the join in a spreadsheet, a Slack thread, and a quarterly post-mortem every time the team runs a test.
What to check in your own stack
- Pick one recent launch or experiment.
- List every tool touched before it went live.
- List every tool used to measure the result.
- Find where the final decision lives.
- Ask whether the next person running a similar test can find the answer in under two minutes.
If not, the company is paying the tool sprawl tax.
Sources
- Businesses at Work 2024. Okta, February 2024. https://www.okta.com/businesses-at-work/2024/
- 2024 State of SaaS Sprawl. Productiv, 2024. https://productiv.com/state-of-saas/
- State of SaaSOps 2023. BetterCloud, May 2023. https://www.bettercloud.com/monitor/state-of-saasops/
- Forecast: Public Cloud Services, Worldwide, 2022-2028. Gartner, April 2024. https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2024-04-23-gartner-forecasts-worldwide-public-cloud-end-user-spending-to-surpass-675-billion-in-2024
- SaaS Trends Report 2024. Vendr, 2024. https://www.vendr.com/blog/saas-trends
- 2024 Connectivity Benchmark Report. MuleSoft, 2024. https://www.mulesoft.com/lp/reports/connectivity-benchmark
- State of RevOps 2024. Pavilion and SaaSWorks, 2024. https://www.joinpavilion.com/resources/state-of-revops-2024
- State of Data and Analytics 2024. Salesforce Research, 2024. https://www.salesforce.com/news/stories/data-analytics-research-2024/
- The State of CRM Data Quality 2024. Validity, 2024. https://www.validity.com/resource-center/state-of-crm-data-quality-2024/
- State of Customer Data 2024. Forrester Research, 2024. https://www.forrester.com/report/the-state-of-customer-data/
- Glean Raises $260M Series E at $4.6B Valuation. TechCrunch, September 10, 2024. https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/10/glean-an-enterprise-search-startup-raises-260m-at-a-4-6b-valuation/
- Sunset of Google Optimize: What You Need to Know. Google Marketing Platform Blog, January 20, 2023. https://blog.google/products/marketingplatform/analytics/sunset-google-optimize/
- CMO Spend Survey 2024. Gartner, May 2024. https://www.gartner.com/en/marketing/research/annual-cmo-spend-survey-research
- Accelerate State of DevOps Report 2024. DORA / Google Cloud, October 2024. https://cloud.google.com/devops/state-of-devops