Inactive-User License Reclamation: Stop Paying for Seats Nobody Uses
Cross-reference your software license assignments against last-login activity and the active-employee list to surface seats held by inactive or departed users — then run a manager-approved reclaim that exports a clean list to your license admin. Nothing is ever revoked automatically.
A web tool where you import your license assignments, last-login activity, and the active-employee list; AI flags seats held by inactive or departed users using your own definition of 'inactive'; the user's manager and IT approve each reclaim; and the tool produces a reclaim batch with a savings tally plus a CSV export for your license admin — never revoking anything on its own.
Before you start
- A Supabase account (free)
- A Vercel account (free)
- A Resend account (free)
- A license assignment export (user + product + last activity)
- Your active-employee / HR list (CSV or sheet)
- Claude Code or any AI coding agent
The problem this kills
Somewhere in your company, money is leaking through software seats that nobody touches. A salesperson left six months ago but still holds a $150/month CRM license. Three analysts churned through a BI tool, used it twice, and quietly stopped. A department over-bought seats "to be safe" at renewal. Every one of those is a recurring charge against a license someone is no longer using — and at true-up or renewal time, you're paying for all of them.
Finding them by hand is miserable. You export a seat list from each tool, export an activity report, export the HR active-employee list, and then play spreadsheet detective: VLOOKUP, eyeball, repeat. It's slow, it's error-prone, and the scariest part is acting on it — yank the wrong seat and you've locked a working employee out of the system they need at 9am Monday. So most teams just... don't. The waste keeps compounding. You don't need to be a developer to fix this.
What you'll build
A simple internal web tool. You import three things: your license assignment export (who has what product, and when they last used it), your active-employee / HR list, and any separate last-login activity you have. The tool dedupes assignments by user-and-product, then flags every seat that looks reclaimable: users who haven't logged in for longer than your configurable threshold, and users who no longer appear on the active-employee list (departed). It protects shared and service accounts so you never flag the mailbox that runs your invoices.
Then it does the important part: instead of revoking anything, it drafts a reclaim list and routes each one to the user's manager and IT for approval. Only the seats a human approves move into a reclaim batch, which the tool tallies into a running savings number and exports as a clean CSV for your license admin to action in the actual system. Nothing is ever auto-revoked.
What's inside the Implementation Plan
The downloadable plan is a step-by-step file you paste into an AI coding agent. It opens by interviewing you about your business — which tools you're trying to reclaim seats in, exactly how your assignment and HR exports are named, what counts as "inactive" in your shop, how you tell a real person from a shared or service account, your typical and peak seat counts, and who has to sign off on a reclaim — and then it tailors the data model, the inactivity rules, and every later step to your answers. This is not a generic template; the agent reflects a short spec back to you and waits for your thumbs-up before it builds anything. From there it walks the agent through the imports, the dedupe-and-flag logic, the shared/service-account protection, the manager-and-IT approval screen, the reclaim batch and savings tally, and the CSV export — each step with a ready-to-copy prompt. There's also a fallback so you can build the whole thing today even with no API to your license tools.
The governance it includes (this is the point)
This tool touches who keeps access to what, so it ships with the controls an IT team needs: login so only your team can use it, row-level security so you only ever see your own organization's data, a complete audit trail of who flagged, approved, and exported each reclaim and when, a hard human-approval gate so no seat is marked for removal until the user's manager and IT both sign off, and duplicate guards keyed on user-and-product so the same seat can't be reclaimed twice. Shared and service accounts are protected from flagging by default, and the tool only ever drafts — the actual revoke happens in your real license system, by a person, from the CSV you export.
Who it's for
IT asset and license managers, IT security, and IT finance — anyone who owns software spend and is tired of paying for empty seats but nervous about pulling access by hand. If you can describe how your company decides a seat is unused, you can build this.
You've got this — start with the plan, paste the first prompt, answer the interview, and you'll see your reclaimable-seat list (and the dollars behind it) take shape the same weekend.