In most companies under 150 people, there is no IT department. There's a founder with a password manager and a credit card.

I know because I was that founder. Every software decision in the company flowed through me: someone needs a seat in Miro — Slack message to me. Someone's trial expired — me. New hire needs access to six tools — me again, ideally before their first standup.

The standard advice is: hire an IT manager, or make office ops own it. That's one more salary to solve a problem that is mostly about information, not administration. The team doesn't need a gatekeeper. They need to know three things: what software the company already has, who owns each subscription, and how to get a seat without bothering the CEO.

Self-service, the way it should work

Here's the model that finally got me out of the loop. Every employee sees a catalog of the company's software — the actual list, not tribal knowledge. Every subscription has an owner: the person who manages the Figma plan, the person who owns the OpenAI account. When someone needs access, they request it directly from the owner. One click to ask, one click to approve.

Notice what disappears in this model. The founder as a middleman — gone. The “wait, we already pay for that?” moment — gone, because the catalog is visible before anyone signs up for a duplicate. The mystery seats — gone, because every seat traces back to a request and an owner.

The duplicate tax

The quiet cost of not having this is duplicates. When people can't see what the company already has, they solve their own problem: a second screen-recording tool, a third AI assistant, a personal Canva next to the team Canva. Each one is small. Together they're a tax on every invoice — and a mess on every offboarding.

We designed Subscope around this exact idea: software management that any employee can use, not an admin console that requires training. Employees get the catalog and the request button. Owners get approvals and usage visibility. Founders get their Slack DMs back.

No IT hire required — the setup is signing in with your corporate Google Workspace account, and the first inventory builds itself from vendor emails in about ten minutes. My honest pitch: try being out of the software loop for one month. You will not want back in.