Most agency owners know their tool stack has got out of hand. They just don’t know by how much. The average UK digital agency with 5–15 staff is spending somewhere between £800 and £2,000 per month on software — and that figure typically includes at least three tools that overlap in function, two that nobody uses properly, and one that should have been cancelled eighteen months ago.
This isn’t about being frugal. It’s about the operational drag that comes from a fragmented stack: data that lives in five different places, new hires who spend their first month just learning the tools, and management reports that require a morning of copy-pasting before the numbers are usable. The ideal tech stack isn’t the cheapest one — it’s the one where every tool is genuinely load-bearing, integrates cleanly with the others, and requires no manual glue to keep it working.
Here’s an honest look at what that stack looks like in 2024, category by category, and what deserves to get cut.
What the Typical Bloated Stack Looks Like
Before we talk about what to keep, it’s worth being specific about what most agencies are running. In conversations with agency owners across the UK, a common pattern emerges. The stack usually grew organically: someone tried Toggl for time tracking, another person was already using HubSpot from a previous job, the accounts team insisted on FreeAgent, and a client complained about email delays so someone set up Zendesk. Each decision made sense in isolation. Together, they create a fragmented system where no single view of a client relationship exists anywhere.
Notice how the “Consolidate” verdict outnumbers everything else. That’s the point. Most agencies are running eight or nine separate tools where three would do — and the eight-tool version costs three times as much and creates four times the operational overhead.
The Three Layers of a Sensible Agency Stack
Strip away the noise and a well-run agency in 2024 needs exactly three layers of software. Everything else is either redundant, replaceable, or should be built in to one of the three.
Layer 1: Agency operations platform (the core)
This is the single system that owns your client relationships, projects, billing, and support. It should be built specifically for agencies — not a generic project management tool stretched beyond its design. The distinction matters more than it might seem. Tools like ClickUp and Monday.com are genuinely excellent at task management, but they were not designed around the concepts your agency lives on: retainers, billable hours, client health, support SLAs, or e-signed contracts. You end up building elaborate workarounds that break whenever the tool updates.
A purpose-built agency platform like Marque CRM handles CRM, projects (Kanban, Gantt, milestones), time tracking, invoicing, recurring retainers, contracts with e-signature, support ticketing with SLA tracking, client health scores, and a white-label client portal — all connected by design. A client record shows you their open tickets, current project status, outstanding invoices, retainer balance, and site health on a single screen. No Zapier, no copy-paste, no reconciliation.
For a 10-person agency, this layer should cost £79–£149/month. If you’re spending more than that across six separate tools doing the same jobs, the consolidation case is straightforward.
Layer 2: Communication
Slack or Microsoft Teams. Pick one and enforce it. This is not an area worth consolidating further — both tools have deep integrations, solid mobile apps, and do the job well. Teams makes sense if you’re already on Microsoft 365; Slack is better for agencies with a heavier technical or creative culture. The key discipline here is keeping internal communication inside this layer and not letting it bleed into email or into your project management tool’s comment threads.
What you should cut: a second communication tool. Running both Slack and Teams is common in agencies that merged teams or where different clients use different tools. Pick one for internal. Client communication belongs in the client portal or your shared inbox — not in a client’s Slack workspace if you can help it, because that puts your work history on infrastructure you don’t control.
Layer 3: Document creation and file storage
Google Workspace or Microsoft 365. Again, pick one. These are non-negotiable because your clients will send and receive documents in these formats and your accountant almost certainly uses one of them. The choice comes down to your team’s existing preference and whether you’re already invested in one ecosystem. Google Workspace at £9.20/user/month for the Business Starter tier or Microsoft 365 Business Basic at £4.90/user/month are both sensible. Don’t pay for both.
What you should cut: Notion, Confluence, or any other team wiki that duplicates what Google Drive or SharePoint already does. Agencies adopt these tools with the best intentions and they become graveyards within six months. If your processes are documented anywhere, they should be in your agency operations platform — not in a separate wiki that nobody checks before starting a new project.
The Tools That Almost Always Get Cut Too Late
Beyond the obvious consolidation targets, certain categories of tool persist in agency stacks long after they’ve stopped earning their keep. Here’s where to look first.
Standalone uptime and site monitoring tools. Uptime Robot, Pingdom, StatusCake — these are all solid products solving a real problem. But paying £20–£80/month for a standalone monitoring tool only makes sense if your agency operations platform doesn’t include monitoring. For agencies managing WordPress sites on retainer, built-in site monitoring that covers uptime, SSL expiry, and plugin vulnerabilities eliminates this category entirely. If your CRM can tell you a client’s site went down while you’re looking at their support ticket queue, you don’t need a separate dashboard.
Standalone contract and e-signature tools. DocuSign costs £25–£45/user/month. PandaDoc and HelloSign are similarly priced. These tools do one thing: get documents signed electronically. If your agency operations platform includes contracts with built-in e-signature, and those contracts are connected to the same client record as your invoices and retainers, the standalone tool becomes pure waste. The only reason to keep one is if you’re sending very high volumes of complex legal documents — which most agencies aren’t.
Standalone client portals. Basecamp, Clinked, SuiteDash — client portal tools proliferate because agencies want to look professional and reduce “where are we with X?” emails. But a standalone portal that isn’t connected to your project management, invoicing, or support systems ends up being another data silo you manually update. A white-label client portal that’s genuinely integrated with your project and billing data is a different proposition: clients can see live project status, download invoices, and raise tickets without any manual exports on your side.
Standalone helpdesk tools. Zendesk is overkill for agencies with 20–100 clients. You don’t need multi-tier customer success workflows, community forums, or a dedicated help centre. You need a shared inbox with ticket assignment, SLA tracking, and a record of every conversation linked to the relevant client. Paying £25–£55/agent/month for Zendesk when you have four support-facing staff is £100–£220/month for a feature set you’re using at 15% capacity.
The Integration Question: Native vs. Zapier
One of the telltale signs that a stack has grown without a plan is the number of Zapier (or Make) workflows holding it together. If your agency has more than three active automations bridging tools that should natively communicate, that’s a warning sign — not a solution.
Zapier integrations cost money (Zapier’s Professional plan starts at £16/month and real agency usage quickly requires multi-step zaps and higher task volumes). More importantly, they break silently. An API change on either connected tool can kill the workflow without any notification. You don’t find out until a project wasn’t created in ClickUp from a CRM deal, or an invoice wasn’t generated from a completed project, and by the time you trace it back the gap is weeks old.
The right question to ask about any integration in your stack is: does this exist because the tools weren’t designed to talk to each other, or does it exist because two genuinely separate systems need to exchange specific data? The first kind should be eliminated by consolidating onto a platform where the data is native. The second kind — like syncing invoices to Xero for your accountant, or pulling in Shopify order data for e-commerce clients — is legitimate and worth maintaining.
A useful heuristic: if you can describe the Zapier workflow as “every time X happens in tool A, create a record in tool B”, and both X and the record are about the same client or project, those two tools should be the same tool. You’re using Zapier to simulate integration that a purpose-built platform would provide natively.
What to Keep External to Your Core Platform
Consolidation has limits. Some tools sit outside your agency operations platform for good reasons and that’s fine — the goal is a coherent stack, not a monolith.
Accounting software. Xero and QuickBooks both have genuine depth that’s worth the subscription: VAT returns, payroll, bank reconciliation, accountant access, Making Tax Digital compliance. Don’t try to replace these with your agency platform’s invoicing module. The right relationship is: your agency platform creates the invoice and the time-tracked revenue data, and syncs it across to Xero or QuickBooks for your accountant to work with. The integration should be native and automatic — no manual exports.
SEO and marketing analytics tools. If your agency sells SEO or content marketing services, tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Screaming Frog are professional instruments, not overhead. These aren’t candidates for consolidation into your CRM. What you might consolidate is the reporting layer on top of these tools — rather than paying separately for AgencyAnalytics or DashThis to visualise data you’re already pulling from Google Analytics and Search Console, check whether your agency platform’s reporting module covers the key metrics you need to show clients.
Specialist creative tools. Figma, Adobe Creative Cloud, and similar design tools are professional instruments with no sensible substitute. These belong in the stack permanently and aren’t bloat. The waste to watch for is paying for seat licences for team members who don’t use them — Figma at £12/editor/month adds up quickly when account managers have access they never open.
Building the Lean Stack in Practice
Cutting tools is harder than adding them. People have workflows built around existing tools, and “we’re switching to save money” is not a compelling pitch to a senior account manager who has three client meetings before lunch. The transition needs to be framed correctly and sequenced carefully.
Start with a tool audit. Pull every SaaS charge from the last three months of company card statements, including annual subscriptions (divide by 12). For each tool, note how many people use it more than twice a week and which workflows it supports. Any tool with fewer than three regular users that duplicates a workflow covered by another tool goes on the consolidation shortlist immediately.
Then map the consolidation to a specific platform that replaces multiple shortlist items at once. The economics need to be visible: “we’re cancelling Zendesk (£180/month), Uptime Robot (£40/month), our DocuSign subscription (£60/month), and our standalone client portal (£80/month), and replacing all four with one platform at £149/month” is a story that lands with finance and with the team.
Migrate new clients first. Don’t try to move existing client data and live workflows simultaneously — it’s the most common reason agency platform migrations fail. Bring all new clients onto the new system from day one. Run parallel for four to six weeks while existing clients naturally close out or renew. By the time you migrate the remaining clients, your team already knows the platform and the transition is mechanical rather than disruptive.
The agencies that run the leanest stacks aren’t the ones that use the fewest tools — they’re the ones that use the right tools for genuinely distinct jobs, and have one platform that owns the operational core. In 2024, that distinction is clearer than ever: horizontal tools have got better at tasks, but agency-specific platforms have matured to the point where the “build it in ClickUp” approach has a real, quantifiable cost attached to it.
The Benchmark Numbers to Aim For
Before you close this tab, here are concrete targets for a 10-person agency with 30–50 active clients. These are achievable — agencies running on a consolidated stack routinely hit them.
- Total monthly SaaS spend (excl. Google Workspace / M365): under £250/month
- Number of authoritative systems of record: three or fewer (agency operations platform, communication, document storage)
- Active Zapier/Make workflows bridging gaps between tools: two or fewer
- Time to generate a complete monthly client report: under 15 minutes (mostly automated)
- Onboarding time for a new hire to be fully operational: under two weeks
- Number of places a new team member must check to get full context on a client: one
If your current stack misses more than two of these benchmarks, the problem isn’t any individual tool — it’s the architecture of the stack. The fix isn’t another tool. It’s fewer, better ones.