Laoshi turned a Gmail inbox into a full software inventory in 10 minutes
Challenge
Laoshi is the edtech company behind one of the most popular Chinese-learning apps: smart flashcards with spaced repetition, HSK word lists, a dictionary, and Laoshi Classroom for teachers. The product has been featured on TechCrunch and won a Red Dot design award.
Behind the scenes is a small distributed team with no dedicated IT function. Software crept in the way it always does: design tools on one founder’s card, analytics on another, AI assistants adopted by developers, education-specific services added by content creators.
Nobody could confidently answer three simple questions: what do we pay for, who actually uses it, and what happens to all those accounts when someone leaves? Some subscriptions only surfaced when the CEO spotted an unfamiliar charge on a bank statement.
Approach
Laoshi signed in to Subscope with the company’s Google Workspace account — the same corporate Gmail the team already uses. That was the entire setup: Subscope is CASA Tier 3 audited, connects read-only, and only processes emails from software vendors tied to subscriptions.
Within about ten minutes, Subscope had parsed vendor emails and assembled the first inventory: subscriptions, renewal dates, and monthly totals. No SSO project, no CSV exports, no integration tickets.
- 30+ subscriptions identified automatically — including several the CEO had never approved
- Duplicate tools doing the same job in different corners of the team
- Annual renewals scheduled to charge within weeks, now with advance reminders
- AI tools connected for real-time token spend tracking
Then the team was invited in: every employee sees the company software catalog and can request access, and software owners approve in a click.
Solution
Today Subscope is Laoshi’s single source of truth for software:
- A live dashboard of every subscription, its owner, and monthly cost
- Alerts before every upcoming charge — no more surprise renewals
- Usage tracking that flags seats nobody has touched in weeks
- Onboarding and offboarding flows, so accounts are granted and revoked the day people join or leave
- Real-time AI token spend across the tools the team uses daily
The unused seats and duplicate tools surfaced in the first month added up to roughly 17% of Laoshi’s monthly software spend.
Results
What’s next
Laoshi plans to:
- add bank statement parsing as a second data source for full coverage,
- use per-vendor spend history to negotiate annual contracts and discounts,
- roll out the Subscope Chrome extension to spot new tools as soon as they appear.
