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We start with your data, not our assumptions
Before the first call, we ask for three months of invoices, your current vendor contracts, and a rough org chart. We read them before we speak to anyone. Most consultants do this in reverse.
We answer the questions your infrastructure keeps asking.
Why does your tech stack cost more every quarter?
TechGrid NexStream audits technology infrastructure for mid-size organizations, maps where spend leaks, and builds a documented path to fix it. No retainer lock-in, no vendor kickbacks.
Published2019
FounderMarcus Ellery
Our addressNakagawanishi 3-7-22, Osaka-shi, Ikuno-ku, Osaka 544-0032, Japan
Legal
- Reads vendor contracts before the first client meeting, not afterp.03
- No referral fees or vendor partnerships, everp.05
- All findings cite the source document and line numberp.07
- Fixed flat-fee quotes before any work beginsp.09
- Deliverables are plain documents, not locked in a proprietary portalp.11
- Team comes from in-house IT finance, not traditional consultingp.13
31%
Key finding
The median organization in our 2025 benchmark dataset was paying for 31 percent more SaaS seats than it was actively using.
01 — The team behind the numbers
The team behind the numbers
TechGrid NexStream started in 2019 when Marcus Ellery, then a senior infrastructure analyst at a regional logistics firm in the Midwest, noticed that the same three mistakes kept appearing in every technology budget he reviewed: software nobody logged into, cloud instances nobody had turned off, and contracts that auto-renewed because nobody had set a calendar reminder. He left to document those patterns systematically, initially as a one-person practice working out of a shared office in Columbus, Ohio.
The turning point came in early 2021, when a manufacturing client asked Marcus to review a cloud migration that had gone over budget by roughly 40 percent. The review took six weeks. The report identified eleven specific causes, eight of which were contractual rather than technical. That engagement was written up as a case study and shared on a niche infrastructure forum. Within three months, four new clients had reached out citing that post. The team grew to include two additional analysts, Priya Nandakumar and Joel Strasser, both of whom came from in-house IT finance roles rather than consulting backgrounds.
We read every contract before the first client call.
02 — Published reports and tools
Published reports and tools
Our products — Published reports and tools
| Ref | Our products | Value |
|---|---|---|
| E01 | SaaS Utilization Benchmark Report 2025 We surveyed 84 organizations across manufacturing, logistics, and professional services t… |
$149 |
| E02 | Cloud Invoice Decoder (Annotated Template) A 14-page annotated walkthrough of a composite AWS invoice, built from anonymized client … |
$49 |
| E03 | Vendor Negotiation Brief Template The exact brief structure we use when preparing clients to renegotiate enterprise softwar… |
$79 |
| E04 | Infrastructure Audit Framework (Full Methodology) The complete TechGrid NexStream audit methodology, 38 pages, covering data collection, ut… |
$199 |
| E05 | Post-Merger IT Integration Checklist A 72-item checklist built from five completed post-merger integration engagements, coveri… |
$89 |
Expect a reply in 24 hours or so..
Conclusion
Three engagements open this quarter.
TechGrid NexStream audits technology infrastructure for mid-size organizations, maps where spend leaks, and builds a documented path to fix it. No retainer lock-in, no vendor kickbacks.
Book a Discovery CallOur products
How we actually work
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Every finding is sourced
Each recommendation in our final report carries a line reference to the contract clause, the invoice line, or the benchmark dataset it came from. You can check our work. We expect you to.
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We do not sell software
TechGrid NexStream has no referral agreements with any vendor. When we recommend a tool, it is because the numbers support it, not because someone is paying us to say so.
News & Announcements
News & Announcements
2025-07-05
How to read an enterprise software contract before you sign it
Most organizations spend more time negotiating the price on page one of an enterprise software contract than they spend reading the 47 pages that follow it. That asymmetry is expensive. The vendor's legal team has drafted those pages hundreds of times; your procurement lead may be reading them for the first time under deadline pressure. This walkthrough is not legal advice — it is a guided tour of the specific clause structures that show up repeatedly in enterprise SaaS, on-premise, and hybrid agreements, and that reliably produce budget surprises twelve to thirty-six months after signing. The examples used below are drawn from anonymized real contract language shared with the TechGrid NexStream research team by procurement officers at mid-market and enterprise organizations. Names, vendor identities, and dollar amounts have been removed or generalized.
Read more →2026-06-05
What does a cloud migration actually cost? A line-by-line breakdown
Cloud migration budgets are almost always wrong. Not off by a rounding error — off by 40, 60, sometimes 90 percent. The usual culprit is not the compute bill everybody modeled in the original business case; it is the long tail of costs that appear only after the first workload actually moves. Over the past two years the TechGrid NexStream team worked alongside five organizations — a regional insurer, a SaaS startup scaling past Series B, a mid-market manufacturer, a university research group, and a logistics provider — and collected every invoice, every change order, and every line item that showed up in their cloud spend from kick-off to steady state. What follows is what the spreadsheets actually said, not what the pre-sales slide decks promised. Some of the numbers will surprise you. A few of them surprised us.
Read more →2025-11-12
The SaaS utilization problem: why 31% of seats go unused
Every year, finance teams sign off on SaaS renewals for tools that a significant portion of their workforce has never opened. The number we kept landing on, across 84 organizations and roughly 210,000 individual seat records, was 31 percent — nearly one in three licensed seats sitting dormant at any given 90-day window. That figure is not a rounding anomaly or a seasonal dip. It is a structural pattern, and it clusters in ways that are specific enough to be actionable. The organizations hit hardest are not the smallest or the largest; they sit in a particular band of headcount and IT maturity that makes them uniquely vulnerable to seat waste. What follows is an attempt to explain the shape of that vulnerability — where the waste concentrates, what the most-abandoned platforms share, and why the usual remedies mostly fail.
Read more →4.6Yrs
Average years of unused licenses found per audit
3
Active engagements at any one time (our cap)
84
Organizations in our 2025 benchmark dataset
38
Pages in our published audit methodology
About the shop
Who runs the shop
Marcus Ellery
Founder, Established since 2019
Marcus Ellery spent eight years as a senior infrastructure analyst at Hartwell Logistics Group in Columbus, Ohio, where he managed a technology budget that grew from $2.1M to $6.4M between 2011 and 2019. He left to found TechGrid NexStream after documenting a pattern of recurring spend errors that no vendor had any incentive to flag. His analysis of cloud migration cost overruns has been cited in posts on the Infrastructure Owners Forum and referenced in a 2023 piece by the technology desk at Midwest Business Review. He reads contract fine print for recreation, which his colleagues find alarming. He cycles to work when the weather allows, and he keeps a running spreadsheet of every SaaS tool he has personally cancelled since 2017.
FAQ
Common questions
How is this different from hiring a big consulting firm?
Large consulting firms assign junior analysts and bill senior partner rates. At TechGrid NexStream, the person who scopes the engagement is the person who does the work. We also publish our methodology, which means you can evaluate our approach before you hire us. Most large firms treat their frameworks as proprietary.
Do you have vendor partnerships or referral agreements?
No. We have turned down referral arrangements from three software vendors since 2021. Our recommendations are based on what the data supports. If we recommend a tool, we will show you the comparison that led to that recommendation.
What size organization do you typically work with?
Most of our clients have between 40 and 400 employees and a technology budget somewhere between $500,000 and $5 million annually. Below that range, the engagement fee is hard to justify. Above it, the complexity usually warrants a full-time internal hire, and we will tell you that honestly.
How long does a typical engagement take?
A vendor contract analysis runs two to three weeks. A full technology spend audit is four to six weeks. An infrastructure architecture review is typically five to seven weeks. We give you a specific timeline in the scope document before you sign anything.
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