Four vendors when one would have done.

Early on, founders pick separate vendors for identity, email, file storage, and meetings. Each is the cheapest convenient option. The combined integration cost and duplicated functionality runs into five figures per month, for years, before anyone notices.

Artifacts scatter across platforms. The spec lives in one tool, meeting notes in another, customer data in a third, and they become unfindable when the team grows or someone leaves. Employees waste hours hunting for documents that exist in the company but not in the tool they thought to check. The duplicated spend is a slow drip of investor money that does not go into product or GTM. Each vendor adds administrative overhead: contract renewals, price increases, security questionnaires when a customer asks. Each adds an identity surface: an account to provision on hire, deprovision on departure, audit access controls for. Each adds an audit-trail surface: a separate log of who did what, hard to correlate when something goes wrong. Compliance evidence sits in five places instead of one when the hospital reviewer asks where it lives. When consolidation finally begins, every team has to migrate, every workflow has to be rebuilt, and every employee retrains on the new stack.

Consolidate to a single integrated stack on day one. One identity surface. One audit trail. One vendor relationship.