Introducing Cadence: track SaaS renewals and wasted seats inside Jira

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Cadence is now available for Jira Cloud. It tracks every SaaS subscription your team runs, warns you before one auto-renews, and shows you how much you are paying for seats nobody uses.

This post covers the problem it exists for and two decisions that shaped it.

The problem

Most teams do not know what they are spending on software until the invoice lands. The subscriptions are bought by different people, on different cards, renewing on different dates, and the one person who signed up for a tool has usually moved on.

The expensive part is not the tools you decided to keep. It is the ones that renewed while nobody was looking, and the seats you kept paying for after people left.

Finance sees the charges but not what they are for. Admins know what the tools do but never see the bill. Cadence puts both in the same place, inside Jira, where the people who actually own the tooling already work.

What it does

• A registry of every subscription: cost, renewal date, owner, seats owned versus seats actually used.
• Renewal warnings before the auto-renew date, not after.
• Seat utilisation, so an underused tool is visible as a number rather than a hunch.
• Redundancy detection, for when two teams are quietly paying for the same category of tool.
• Recoverable spend, totalled, so the case for cancelling something is a figure rather than an argument.

Two decisions worth explaining

1. It lives in Jira rather than beside it

Renewal tracking usually ends up in a spreadsheet that is accurate for about a month. It decays because updating it is nobody's job and it lives somewhere nobody visits.

Putting it in Jira does not magically fix that, but it does put the data where the admin already is, and it means a renewal can become an issue assigned to a person rather than a line in a file. The thing that keeps a registry alive is proximity to the work.

2. It reads as you, not as the app

Anything Cadence does on your behalf runs with your own Jira permissions rather than the app's. If you cannot create an issue in a project, neither can it while acting for you. Scheduled background checks are the only thing that runs as the app, because there is no user in context at 3am.

For developers: this is asUser() in every resolver, with asApp() confined to the scheduled handler. It is enforced by a build check rather than by good intentions.

Availability

Cadence is available now for Jira Cloud, with a free trial handled by Atlassian.

Cadence on the Atlassian Marketplace

If you manage renewals for your organisation and there is something it does not track that it should, I would like to hear it. That feedback is the most useful thing I can get right now.